Review – Defeater – Empty Days and Sleepless Nights

This release has been receiving a lot of plaudits across the board really, so I wanted to check out what all the fuss was about it, and to see whether it lived up to its billing. It has some stiff competition as well at the moment, especially with letlive. and Your Demise both impressing me with their latest albums recently.

Empty Days and Sleepless Nights is a really good record, and will be one that I want to come back to in the coming weeks, I am sure of it. It is fast and furious at the outset, with Warm Blood Rush setting the tone for the early part of the album. Dear Father quickly follows, which I had heard before, and which has crowd on me definitely since first listen, and Waves Crash, Clouds Roll is another frenetic track, and one of the highlights.

Defeater continue on the same path with some solid hardcore stylings, good songs, and fast beats. Some of the tracks are not as memorable as others, and there are a lack of standouts perhaps as the album progresses, but it is still good stuff to the ear. A few more listens would allow familiarity to embed in your psyche, and the listener would definitely to spin this more than once to peel off all the intricate layers. White Oak Doors, at 7 minutes long, is hardcore, prog-induced and inspired odyssey of noise, but is at times the antithesis of what you would want from a hardcore song. Sometime you just want sharp, brief guttural burst of visceral noise and energy, so it won’t appear to everyone, but is a nice change of direction to see a hardcore band attempt something so different.

As the end of the album approaches, the tone changes completely, with an acoustic departure from the hardcore stylings of the earlier half of the record. It comes completely out of nowhere, and is immensely refreshing, with the last four tracks, But Breathing, Brother, I Don’t Mind, and Headstone being some of the albums best tracks. But Breathing and I Don’t Mind are particularly brilliant.

The more I think about it, the more I realise that this is a record that should not just be enjoyed in a hurry, but which needs time to digest and impress you on different levels. The way that the hardcore tracks give way to the prog epic, which leads into the softer and mellower moments is pure genius, and this is a record to unravel, and get into.

I can’t wait to give this another listen, and to fall in love with it even more.

8/10