Remember when screamo was relevant? My god, you are so old. Old enough to be in Ampere! Ampere are the very definition of veterans. They’ve been through the wars. They’ve got the purple hearts pinned to their chequered shirts. They’ve got the stories. The scars. The victories and the defeats. “Like Shadows” is for the first time in nobody knows how long that I have put on a screamo record and been left blown away. The first time I put the record on my eyebrows arched and I sat back in the chair and just let these torrents of furious noise pummel me. Like Shadows is a concentrated assault of mangled guitar and distant, lost vocals, buried within the sound. Emotional violence. A vital ingredient with a good hardcore record is to capture the intensity of the live show, and Ampere have utterly managed that here. Helps that they recorded it themselves, they know what their music is supposed to sound like, and haven’t let any other idiot water anything down. The live chaos translates perfectly to the vinyl yet anyone who ever listened to a decent screamo record can pick their way between the carnage and follow everything perfectly. You kind of have to train yourself to listen to music like this, but if you’ve been listening to this kind of shit at some point in your life, you know the tricks, you know where that guitar is going, you spot the seemingly wild rhythms instantly and are furiously raging within moments.
This is what screamo is meant to be like. Blame the other bands for getting it wrong for so long. Wow.
