Labels: Samstrong
Review by: Alex Deller
Indonesia’s Cloudburst play a cool, caustic brand of metalcore that fits in well enough with certain modern types (think: All Pigs Must Die, Cloud Rat, Death Engine) but also harks back to that patch in the 90s when Cave In were releasing ‘Beyond Hypothermia’, Converge hadn’t yet got round to ‘Jane Doe’ and bands like For The Love Of and Deadeyesunder were still doing the rounds. The music hits a sweet spot between energetic crunch, jagged discord and tasteful melody while the vocals are genuinely pained, and the whole sample-strewn onslaught somehow manages to comes across as inventive without being ostentatiously showy. If there’s an air of bygone familiarity to proceedings then tracks like the standout ‘Personal Golgotha’ quickly sweep it aside, delivering enough emotional heft and limb-mangling brutality to root things in the present and pit Cloudburst against contenders old and new alike.