(October 28th brought the release by Church Road Records of a fourth full-length by Germany’s Implore, and in this review DGR provides a lot of reasons to get enthusiastic about it.)
It’s been a little while since we’ve gotten an album as clearly “bookended” as Implore‘s October release The Burden Of Existence, yet one glance at track times alone and it seems like the masterminds behind the metallic chaos that is Implore got a taste for track-sequencing symmetry.
Implore are not the type of band to go on musical journeys or prog-dalliances, so none of the songs on The Burden Of Existence stretch for time in any sense of the word, but it is fun noticing how the group have three of their four longer songs on The Burden Of Existence positioned within the front two and the back two of the lineup. Of course, when you close out an album with a song called “The Sense Of Endings”, maybe room for subtlety is a couple of train stops away from where we are currently – but alas, we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.
If you need a quick primer on the metallic-hardcore/grind-fueled chaos that is Implore, then may we point you in the direction of the deep dive Synn report on that very subject – written around the time of the group’s 2019 album Alienated Despair, released right at the forefront of a bleak and cathartic wave of music that was no doubt exacerbated by the events of the following year.
The Burden Of Existence – arriving three years later – refines upon that previous album but also does some interesting side-genre hopping that not only has them volleying forth into playgrounds that Rotten Sound and Afgrund might’ve long called home but also sometimes performing a chameleon-esque act that has them sounding as if Crown Feral-era Trap Them never stopped.
Implore gleefully swan-dive off the cliffs of sanity into chaos from the start of The Burden Of Existence. This is an album constructed out of parts that are all recognizable on their own – and influences to match – but played with such a manic looseness and barely-restrained feedback energy loop that it seems like the band themselves are barely holding on to the songs they’ve constructed as they transition from each segment and riff to the next.
Frenetic blasts seem to pop up at random to halt momentum and drag things back on track, and Implore show absolutely no shame this time around in breaking out the occasional two-step or d-beat riff to go alongside each grindier bit or pulse of energy that seems to explode from nowhere.
The longer songs on the album may feel like they’re a little more constructed by sheer virtue of having the time to drift into a specific construction, but the shorter tracks that make up the bulk of the album are often one exercise in scraping across their instruments to throwing them around just to see what kind of noise they make. The titular “The Burden Of Existence” song is the transition point into moments like that earlier on, after “Prior Void” just beats you over the head like an assault on the senses for its four minutes. “Burden” continues almost breathlessly but lays more and more groundwork for songs like “Masochistic Tendencies”, “Sun Deprived”, and “Failure Through Self Preservation” to follow.
If you’re in the hunt to hear Implore lean on a blastbeat-fueled grind session for a little bit then songs like “Ultimate Freedom” and “Archetype” are scattered throughout. “Archetype” especially is the high-energy shitkicker of the album whereas “Ultimate Freedom” transforms into a dodging-fists pit-throwdown -core song. Both have absolutely massive and joyously dumb faux-breakdown sections in them with “Archetype” taking the record for it. being a simple start-and-stop section to punctuate the end of a few measures, like Implore gleefully yelling “haha, fuck you”.
The end of the song is when they finally give over to “Archetype”, becoming a full beatdown for a bit, but by that point you’ve had plenty of heat generated alone from drummer Markus Matzinger hitting the hell out of the kit.
You get the sense that Implore are a tightly packed-unit throughout the opening few songs on The Burden Of Existence, even as the songs themselves seem to explode outward and more violently each time until its closing moments – many of the songs within the album are as punchy as they could seemingly get.
There’s a lot of appeal in an album that gets by on the feeling of being scrappy alone. We all love an underdog, and when a disc like The Burden Of Existence is released with music that is so snot-nosed, punk-fueled, and ready for a fight at the smallest provocation, it seems as if this is that sort of album. It’s the fourth full-length for a group who’ve kept to a pretty steady every-two-to-three-year cadence since their debut Depopulation back in 2015, and Implore remain as teeth-gnashing as ever. The heavy lean into the metallic-hardcore inspirations this time is certainly appreciated, as the immediate appeal of a bunch of instinctual-pit-riffage and hammering grooves can’t be denied.
The Burden Of Existence is an exercise in bouncing off of walls with no padding and yet somehow maintaining the same amount of energy on rebound as you had when impacting. Let it never be said that Implore certainly didn’t throw “a lot” at you over the course of this album. It may stay within a pretty traditional thirty-five minute album length but those are thirty-five very high energy, sweat-on-the-brow inducing, fire-fueled, and caveman throwing things around the room minutes.
https://implore.bandcamp.com/album/the-burden-of-existence
https://www.facebook.com/imploreband