Album Review: Lorna Shore - I Feel The Everblack Festering Within Me
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
To call New Jersey’s Lorna Shore a Deathcore band would be to severely undersell them. Seeming to have exploded onto the music scene post-Covid, the band have existed in one iteration or another since back in 2009, the original members having stepped away during the formative years.
Guitarist Adam De Micco and drummer Austin Archey have been steering the ship since almost the beginning, but it was the recruitment of vocalist Will Ramos that seems to have lit the touchpaper to the band’s current stature. From the …And I Return to Nothing EP, to the Pain Remains full length in 2022, Lorna Shore have been on an ever-upward trajectory, with the latest musical statement, I Feel the Everblack Festering Within Me, being a declaration of intent.
Present of course are the usual tropes you expect from the band: heavy bombs of percussion, combined with rapid-fire machine gun blasts, hefty chugging guitars that spiral into soaring solos, invisible bass, going about its function with clinical efficiency, and a vocal range that moves between the choral to the downright nasty. But Lorna Shore is far more than the sum of its parts and this new record goes all in to demonstrate the range and creative imagination behind it.
At ten-tracks and with a running time of close to seventy-minutes, I Feel the Everblack Festering Within Me is an exhausting listen, if not for the time investment, but for the sheer weight of what you’re hearing. This is progressive deathcore at its absolute limit, with every facet of the creative process dismantled, examined and put on display. To some its scope and execution is a work of creative genius, to others, it’s unnecessarily overblown – possibly both, depending on your own point of view at any particular time.
What can’t be denied is the ambition that is evident throughout the record. Eight out of the ten tracks break the five-minute running time and even though Unbreakable and War Machine don’t have the presence of other songs here, they brim the deathcore motifs to satisfy the most ardent adherent to the genre. Unbreakable even comes with a hypnotic mid-section and War Machine with an artillery-like percussion.
However, it feels like the album is partially a concept of sorts, as Lorna introduces classical strings and gothic keys earlier on in opener Prison of Flesh. The juxtaposition of the light and shade, of the symphonic and the metallic, run rife through this and first single, Oblivion, which the band played at this year’s Download show.
Complex combinations of musical ideas present themselves in huge walls of sound, pit-destroying sections rub shoulders with emotional, almost soundtrack, elements; In Darkness is uplifted by a continuous choral underpinning, Death Can Take Me’s opening salvos feel like a cousin of Jerry Goldsmith’s score to The Omen, even more so as the track descends in a mire of demonic babble.
The short A Nameless Hymn gives way to the closing epic of Forevermore, blending traditional instrumentation and a snappy guitar with a huge scope and a bombastic grandeur, Lorna Shore see the album off in style. Perhaps not made for the casual listener, Forevermore is a brash and brazen middle-finger to all who think the deathcore genre to be one-dimensional.
Even when I Feel the Everblack Festering Within Me leans more toward the traditions of the band’s history, it does so with additional elements. Glenwood, for all its destructive drums, features soulful, spiralling guitars and moments of calm; Lionheart is fast and symphonic with a big breakdown and pig grunt vocals, but also with enough of the classical to conjure the eternal battle between the divine and the corporeal.
With I Feel the Everblack Festering Within Me, Lorna Shore have created an extensive and, yes, exhausting album, that will surely reward frequent revisits; initially it’s far from a background listen and will reap the benefits of close attention, at least in the early days. Think Tool, Enslaved or Opeth as points of reference.
