Album Review: Greyhaven - Keep It Quiet
Reviewed by Rob Barker
Techy, aggressive mathcore from the very beginning with Burn a Miracle – interspersed with clean verse/bridge vocals makes it reminiscent of early Finch, Norma Jean. Things take a slower pace with Where the Light Leave Us’ more anthemic tones, followed up by some nice riffage and dissonant screams in Night in October.
Technicolour Blues gives off a nice, er, blues vibe, surprisingly, progressing to Satellite in Love’s fun interchanges keeping an overall aggressive and high energy feel, showing off powerful clean vocals as well as quality aggressive ones.
Pounding layers of aggression with From the Backseat of a Moving Car, snaking on into Diamond to Diamond and it’s calmer and noticeable cleanness, albeit with an interesting level of darkness to it – think along the lines of the Dillinger Escape Plan tracks of similar description, such as Unretrofied, One of Us is the Killer etc, probably with a bit more of a 00’s emo vocal feel than DEP gave. We end with Cemetery Sun a somewhat formulaic but good nevertheless metalcore/mathcore track and a decent roundoff to the album.
There’s a lot more depth to Greyhaven compared to their early work. Some would argue that they’ve gotten rid of the “scrappiness” of their sound and succumbed to a considerably more polished new era, however my argument to this would be that it’s not really to their detriment. They’re certainly more along the lines of what would be considered “accessible” compared to more the now more than a decade old Cult America release of 2014, but realistically if they hadn’t changed their sound in these 11 years that’d be a bigger frustration. Give Keep It Quiet a spin, it’s pretty fun!
Reminded me of: early Finch, Norma Jean, later Bring Me the Horizon, Heck, The Dillinger Escape Plan.
