Here in the U.S. many people are celebrating Thanksgiving Day today, a national holiday first officially announced by Abraham Lincoln during our Civil War but modeled on a 1621 harvest feast shared by the English colonists (“Pilgrims”) of Plymouth and the Wampanoag indigenous people (who had previously occupied the Plymouth site but had been decimated by smallpox).
We have many things to be thankful for here at our humble site today, and one of those is Transfixed on Dying Light, the debut album by the Irish band Fraught. Founded in 2018, they survived a change of name (from Drought to Fraught), the rude interferences of the covid pandemic, and the kinds of other difficulties that beset any band trying to make underground music they believe in rather than following whatever way the prevailing winds are blowing.
Fraught are one of those bands who are given to experimentation, inspired by their many influences but driven to interweave them in ways that don’t neatly get circled by genre boundaries. That was already becoming evident in their MMXIX demo (released in 2020) and their first EP, 2021’s Splitting Tongues, but more evident still in this new album, which we’re giving you the chance to hear in advance of its release tomorrow by Argonauta Records.
As Fraught themselves explain, their music deploys “the sounds and textures of death metal and sludge mixed with the atmosphere of black metal”. The first test of that claim in the context of the new album was the record’s opening song, “The Hunt“, which the band released through a video of themselves performing the track.
The song’s opening riff is dissonant and disturbed, operating like someone digging needles under your fingernails. Even when the rest of the band join in, those shrieking and scowling tones carry forward, but even more feverishly disturbing in their effect, especially when magnified by the turbulence of the drumming and the vocalists’ acid screams and vicious roars.
The band provide some release from the harrowing tension they’ve been creating when they bring in a visceral throbbing riff, but swarming tremolo’d vibrations make it more sinister too. The tension really never vanishes; it just becomes more intense, fueled by greater and greater musical and vocal derangement and more savagely clobbering percussive assaults.
“The Hunt” was a good choice for an album opener. Its intensity rivets attention, and it’s also an expression of the band’s interweaving of genre styles. But the songs that follow expand upon Fraught‘s genre hybridization and the dynamism of their songwriting twists and turns.
As you move forward you’ll encounter the raging blackened malignancy, the wailing pain, and the jackhammering ruthlessness of “Crimson Trail“, which also brings in eerie pealing tones, off-kilter drum progressions, and a clanging bass solo, adding disturbing and disorienting hallucinatory ingredients that seize attention as much as the full-throttle rampaging.
On the other hand, the booming grooves of “Indignities of Decay” make it come across like a primitive hulking beast, but the song’s piercing, trilling melodies channel longing and loss — and of course the two-tone vocals are as incinerating and unforgiving as before, and the drumwork is still an inventive surprise in the midst of the hard-fisted slugging and the heart-wrenching agonies.
There’s not much in the way of hope or happiness to be found in the album, but its cathartic effects are powerful, even if they’re the result of onslaughts of turmoil and viciousness, or lead-guitar melodies that make heartache into a searing flame (as in “Increments of Humiliation“)
In all the songs the band show how adept they are at the interweaving mentioned above, bringing together the hard-hitting heaviness, the drilling riffs, and the beastly gutturals of death metal and death/doom; the blasting, the cold blizzard-like riffing, and the cauterizing screams of black metal; and the suffocating oppressiveness and bruising misery of sludge and doom.
But those references still don’t exhaust the ingredients in play here, nor capture the way the album ebbs and flows. The gloom-shrouded “Sublimated Misanthropy“, for example includes (to these ears) hints of prog, post-metal, and psychedelia — segmented by doses of punishing atonal groove (which are never far away in this album) — while “Atrocities of Sin” is a full-throttle fretwork freakout that might be the most deliriously exultant experience to be found here (the band fire up the jackhammers in that song too).
As for the title song, it’s an ebb tide following the “Atrocities” surge, with an instrumental intro segment that’s slow, brittle, bitter, and eerie, haunting and hopeless, followed by a descent into even more emotionally dismantling territory when the full band join in, and a grumbling and growling bass solo backed by an acrobatic drum-tumble that leads to a scalding finale.
There’s one more song. “Prey“, that’s included as a bonus track in the digital download of the album, and stylistically it’s a brilliant futuristic surprise, which we won’t completely spoil by attempting to describe it further.
Well, that was a very wordy introduction wasn’t it! Finally we come to the promised full stream of this excellent album, and we hope you’ll be as thankful for it as we are.
Transfixed on Dying Light was recorded, mixed, and mastered by Shaun Cadogan at Last Light Recordings (Unyielding Love, Malthusian, Coscradh), with artwork created by Black Fever Art.
The album can be pre-saved for streaming now, and info about how to acquired it will soon surface at the other locations linked below. To learn more about Fraught, check out the recent interview at Antichrist Magazine.
PRE-SAVE:
https://ingrv.es/transfixed-on-dying-b7j-p
MORE INFO:
https://www.facebook.com/Fraughtband/
https://www.instagram.com/fraught_official/
https://www.argonautarecords.com/