By: Scott Martin
With a roaring sound that demands your attention alongside technical skill that commands your respect, Abrade The Earth pulls no punches with their debut album The Essence of Everything.
Hailing from Ottawa, Abrade The Earth is a Canadian progressive metalcore band. Drawing influence from groups such as ERRA, Currents and Veil of Maya, it’s clear that they’ve taken the essence of their influences and produced a complete and engaging unique sound.
The Essence of Everything has skillfully balanced slamming riffs, brutal gutturals and hair-raising screams with absolutely beautiful piano sections and instrumentals.
A personal favourite came early in this project during the second song “The Cycle”. Among the cacophony of massive guitars and in-your-face vocals, you can clearly hear a beautiful layer of keys behind it all.
Veterans of the genre will feel right at home with a wide array of adrenaline-pumping tracks that seem to check off every box you could ask for. With such a varied vocal delivery style, I never got bored and constantly thought, “Okay, there’s no way they can surprise me again” just to be proven wrong almost immediately.
The two qualities of the band that truly shine throughout this entire album are the band’s songwriting and their tightness as a group. On the sixth song, “Divisions”, we get these theatrical and exciting synth solos that truly take the song to an entirely new level. This theme of setting an atmosphere is also clearly an intentional goal of the band that we see within the first song. Instead of just diving headfirst into the brutality, we take a short stroll through the beauty.
The first song, “Connections”, opens with the haunting sounds of a turntable coming to life as we hear a sombre piano melody ring out over the crackle and pop of the vinyl. That is, of course, until we hear the nostalgic Navi “Hey! Listen!” and we’re thrown into the middle of it all.
The album comes to a close with the song, “Vague Light”, this song really stood out to me in almost every aspect. With extremely tight production, a fantastic balance between vicious riffs from guitarist James, Thunderous bass from bassist Luis Baez and monstrous screams as well as gorgeous melodic sung sections by vocalist Jared Blanchette, this song truly felt like the perfect finale to this debut album. Not to mention the incredible added touches of sirens in the background, slow fades into guitar tracks, sensitive piano in the choruses that are immediately met with relentless gutturals, the quality and passion put into this album is on full display.
It’s clear that Abrade The Earth had a vision for what this album was to become, and it gives the entire project a beautiful balance of unmistakable passion as well as consummate professionalism.
With a debut album that should be described as nothing less than the definition of “Coming out swinging” This is one band you DON’T wanna miss out on.