After a stunning EP, Sydney’s OAR delivers their Debut Album, The Blood You Crave a completely quite simply stunningly heavy album that takes preconceived notions about heavy music and shatters them.
Take Perfect Agony as an example in five minutes they dissemble at least four musical genres and then create something that is primal, pure supremely heavy yet memorable, and given character from the tortured throat of AL.
From a Black Metal foundation, the title track and ‘Souls Lost in the Frost” take music and make it visceral utilizing the clean production to enhance the atmosphere and offset the pained vocals.
Whilst upfront and demanding OAR are able to become subdued and add some elements of doom to their art yet never sacrifice their intent or lose their direction. The rhythms are dense, and the intensity comes from total commitment. The mid-section of ‘’The Blood You Crave’’ lingers and haunts. This is epic music is as evocative as the superb cover, solitary, standing on the abyss the hues of light and darkness, hope and uncertainty.
The addition of Post black, Shoegaze, and hardcore styles only add to the musical prowess. The Blood You Crave epitomes fury and despair, epic compositions full of encroaching menace and fury, the melancholy of a cold hand on your shoulder, of little comfort and solace.
OAR has created a turbulent experience of anger and heaviness. Unmissable.
OAR: Facebook
Release Year: 2022
Label: Blighttown Records
Category: Album
Country: Australia
Reviewed by Sparky
