Album Review: Wanderer – Liberation From A Brutalist Existence
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
Hailing from the eye of the storm, Minneapolis-based heavy-hitters, Wanderer, finally land their debut album after something of a difficult birthing process. Following up on a couple of EPs from 2016 and 2018 and with altered personnel, Liberation from A Brutalist Existence is twenty-three minutes of dirty, grinding hardcore.
Marionette begins with a crunching guitar and guttural vocals and settles into a mid-paced, yet pummelling, rhythm, complete with massive breakdown. But there’s something else at play here, something that alerts your primordial fight or flight response to stand ready.
Later, Hellhole’s dramatic intro and mid-tempo chug give way to an evil, demonic sound and Frost Cage’s pseudo-black metal opening unfolds into a guitar line that plays with your mind, reiterates there is a darkness at the core of the record.
Although short in running time, Wanderer manage to pack loads of ideas into Liberation from a Brutalist Existence and, although ostensibly a grinding hardcore record, there are plenty of moments when the four-piece go off-script and veer into the otherwise uncharted territories.
Bloom feels about as dirty a track as music should ever get, with its fuzzed-up bass and feedback, Bourn’s slow, grinding crawl is utterly mesmerising and the swirling guitar of Abrasion take steps into Post Hardcore.
Even when Wanderer stay close to the formula, they do so with a youthful abandonment of the perceived rules: Mind Leash, a Napalm-inspired sub-one minute blitz manages to insert a little groove to its climax as Simone revisits Post Hardcore ideas.
Liberation… is the debut of Wanderer’s new vocalist, Dan Lee, but previous singer, Brandon Carrigan makes an appearance on the album’s final track, Contented, another slow grinder with a death-vocal and some sharp stabs of dirty metal meets hardcore.
Lyrically, the band cover topics such as escapism, suicide, self-reflection and the concept of beauty and existential trauma; the kind of subject matter that just begs for crazy nights in the pit. But they manage the fine balancing act of taking such and exploring them against a backdrop of heavy hardcore and the maelstrom of grinding metal.
If you imagined only Converge could manage to walk this fine line then think again, because Wanderer do not seem to be in the mood to take prisoners.
