vinylbabble:

La Dispute - Wildlife

Holy shit, give it up for La Dispute. Post hardcore bands in the last year have been like a zombie invasion busting in your windows and knocking down your door. With excellent releases from Defeater and Touche Amore, two bands that have successfully changed how people at least should feel about the genre, taking preconceptions about it being diary entries put to hardcore music and made it genuinely haunting. La Dispute takes the fucking cake though, and they do it unlike the former bands, who succeeded in adding influences from other genres while still being fundamentally hardcore, La Dispute pulls it off by being completely self indulgent. First off, Wildlife is about an hour long, which is a 14 movement symphony in the post hardcore genre. La Dispute is frankly audacious to think that they can hold your attention for an hour of heavy breathed ramblings, but the thing is that they can. The band interchange and connect through this record brilliantly, without even relying on being brutally heavy. You listen to Wildlife through once without realizing they haven’t used a single breakdown or other cheap hardcore tactic to portray a fake sense of heaviness, in fact they get through about 10 minutes of this record without using a single power chord , it’s uncanny for a record like this but they’ve written a perfect storm of emotion and chaos through expertly written passages. Most impressively I would say I was taken by the lyrics, not that La Dispute are terribly clever or that they manage to wear more heart on their sleeves then other bands like them, it’s the bands keen sense of portraying an accurate sense of chaos with emotion. Poetic Wildlife is not, nonsensical inconclusive bordering psychotic inner dialogue is more accurate. Wildlife reaches a point of vertigo inducing inner turbulence as they lyrically spin around in circles, gone are the diary entries, we’re talking about the thoughts you have where you constantly contradict yourself trying to find what’s right. Wildlife is like an hour of questions with no answers, at least no easy ones, and the drama feels uniquely sincere. None of what La Dispute does comes off as fake poetic conjunction, it doesn’t even really feels like it was planned all that much, Wildlife feels as in the moment as any record I’ve ever heard. For anyone that’s disregarded bands like La Dispute or anything of the post hardcore tag as teenage psycho babble needs to listen to Wildlife, La Dispute haven’t compromised an inch in artistic integrity and bless em because it feels like they’re taking a huge leap of faith with this record and they’ve frankly done an amazing job for it.