Rise After Defeat "Adrift"

From: Italy

Playing: Dark HxC with big bits of metal

Could sound like: Converge with more hair

Just one song: Awareness

Among other qualities, Rise After Defeat always know how to give a good title to their work. Short, clear but ambiguous, they efficiently express what are the intentions of the band.
"Maieutica" sounded like the torments of birth and the painful (and vain) efforts to find a kind of truth. (by the way: never forget this song).
"Pragmatica" kept to the violence but felt like something they had to do, the unavoidable step to go through in order to get further.
But where?
"Adrift" is pretty explicit about it: the Sardinian crew is leaving the coast and is ready to face the open sea.
The boat is the same: claustrophobia and madness; the crew didn't change: the riffs are heavy as lead, the rhythm section oscillates between epilepsy and thunder rumblings, the voices sound like obnoxious barkings and the lyrics won't make your day brighter. Or: everything you need to bang your head under the power of the music without forgetting that madmen use to do the same against the walls of their cell.
Except you can't bang your head for ever. If you want to keep your brain within your skull and prevent insanity from eating what's left of it, you have to get more clever. So, more vicious.
That's why Rise After Defeat chose to turn their back on the land and go away to face the ocean.
Their hardcore is still dark and hectic, but it sounds and feels deeper. The surface is restless, but the waves are bigger. More frightening. No more short bursts of violence and despair crashing against the rocks. But the water seems colder, and no way of lying to yourself when you look around: only isolation and absence of hope.
Rise After Defeat clearly tried to explore new territories (for them). They gave their songs more space and time, which turns the claustrophobia into a sonic neurosis skillfully built and fed, thanks to well chosen detours via black metal, sludge and even stoner. The band were right to go fishing other dark waters. They managed to upgrade their hardcore to create wider land(sea)scapes, not necessarily more complex, but definitely more controlled.
A good surprise, an interesting evolution, a strong album.

the bandcamp.
the site.
the facebook.
the tumblr.
the big cartel.

the objectivity?
- for the kids (IT)
- soundmagazine (IT)

Rise After Defeat "Maieutica"

Maieutica.
Nice name. Lots of vowels, a greco-latin taste, and something a bit different from the usual "Destruction of the blood of the sadness from the brotherhood of the streets in your face".

Maeiutica.
Maieutics.
The art of giving birth. Lots of pain, lots of love, lots of dedication and corporal fluids spilled in the way to get lots of joy. That could be a good summary of this EP: it’s violent, it’s harsh, but at the end it turns into a miraculous happiness to listen to it, because of the energy and the sincerity that were put into it.

    Maieutics is also, and moreover, by extend, the art of giving birth to the truth. Rise After Defeat is not the first nor the last hxc band to risk its riffs and screams in the search of such a vast and unreachable concept. I’m not even sure that hxc is really a good vehicle to embark for that kind of journey. But the way hxc looks for the truth can be full of enseignement about how the truth can be seen.

    For some of us, truth can only be written with a capital letter (as you noticed, i’m not part that crew). It’s this monolithic and monochromatic giant totem you either see or deny. In this case, your ignorance will be seriously shaken, and you need to be smacked straight to the face with the truth, just to be sure you won’t miss it when you pass by. Truth is a shiny sharp blade that separates good from evil, light from darkness, believers from mecreants, Maurice Dantec from the rest of the world.

    For others, truth is an ever-fleeing ghost, neither black, nor white, nor even grey or that kind of dirty beige you can sometimes notice under some english clouds. It’s not solid, not liquid, but it has a flavour and smells like something, but something you can not describe. You will use your own words, everybody will use her/his own words, and the result would be a maelstrom of babelian descriptions nobody would understand, because... because... as Paulo Coelho, Lao Tseu, Vinnie Paz and the Dalai Lama would say: Truth can not be reached because, at the end, it lies within us. Discovering the truth, in this case, would be exploring your self, what remains of your soul. And guess what? That’s exactly what maieutics is about! (in case you were thinking I was getting lost in my own verbiage, pumba!).

Maieutics is a socratic ninja technique to reveal the truth in someone by asking the right questions. It was used by Socrates to massively smash the sophists, and i tis nice to see it recycled by a bunch of tatooed hairy Italians to name their EP. I suppose they choose the name because they feel like belonging to the second kind of truth-seekers, more nuanced, more subtle, more complex.

And if I allow myself to think like that, it is because they sound like that. The 4 songs are built on variations around the passive-agressive alternance between falsely calm short periods and nasty bursts of anger. No square heavily produced bouncing hits for the mosh pit, but a vision of an inner chaos they tried to translate through music. The technical side is neither in the sound, nor in the soli, but was used to create claustrophobic atmospheres and unhealthy songs.

I started to listen to this EP one year ago, and I still can't get tired of it. I admit that it is now so much a part of this last year that I may not be totally objective about it. But music, and especially hxc, is not so much about objectivity than about sincerity. Maieutica was sincerely made, and sincerely love it. Period.

• To listen to it, to download it and to buy it: Rise after Defeat bandcamp
• The official site, with the merch, the tour dates, etc.: Rise after Defeat.Com

You will notice that they released another EP, with once again a very nice name (Pragmatica), and which is as good as Maieutica. So do not hesitate and check it.

Hxc is not about objectivity, but medias still smell better when they offer various sources:

• the usual Hardboiled review
• Asice.net unfortunately did not like it that much
• Metallized, if you read italian (lucky you)
• SoundMagazine, lucky, lucky you...