Band:	WRVTH
Album:	No Rising Sun
Style:	Hardcore, Post-metal
Release date:	August 23, 2019
A review by:	RaduP

01. Eventide
02. Pirouette Of Hysterics
03. Calcified To Stone
04. House Of The Centenary
05. Undertow
06. Enshrined
07. Headstones
08. Dust and Moonlight
09. Abstraction
10. Furrows Of A Dying Tree

It really sucks when you decide not to review an album, but afterwards you find out that it would be the band's last. It happened with Call Of The Void. I'm not letting it happen with WRVTH.

WRVTH have had quite an interesting evolution in sound. Akin to Abigail Williams, both bands shed their "core" skins in order for something more acceptable by underground metal standards. In this care, the deathcore component of their tech death sound was removed, only for the tech death component to also slowly be removed with the move to a more hardcore and post sound. So here we are, on what is WRVTH's only album to be released without a name change (they used to be called "The Wrath Of Vesuvius", but couldn't decide whether to keep the "The"), an album that is almost solely post-metal. Quite a far cry from technical deathcore I'd say.

Well maybe saying that they shed their "core" skin isn't the best way to put it. Their brand of post-metal has some clear hardcore influence, but it's so light and airy that it's still clearly a far cry from the deathcore of their first album. It would be like having Archgoat suddenly release a blackgaze album. So in this case, it actually feels a lot closer to what Deafheaven would sound like if their screamo/hardcore influences were more along the lines of Converge and The Dillinger Escape Plan instead. It's a hardcore album where the acoustic sections make sense. What's the meaning of this? I can't properly mosh to it!

The hardcore elements, even at their most prominent, are always drowned by a shoegaze-ish wall of sound or some post-rock guitars so no matter how many technical chugs it sometimes throws, it never feels like an actual hardcore album, so it feels like a blackgaze album whose light/dark contrast has been greatly increased. Extremely tender when it's tender, some of the heaviest chugs you could have at such lightness when it's at its heaviest. That is indeed a combination of sounds I did come across in different forms but never really quite like that, thus there is a dissonance between the familiarity of the sound and the original way in which it is approached. But it does feel like No Rising Sun favors the tender a bit too much over the vicious, so compared to the previous record, the self-titled one, it feels a bit less exciting.

It would be at this point that I assess how the album fits in the band's discography so far and the way that I hope that they would follow it up. That's not going to happen, at least for now. No Rising Sun might not be WRVTH actual finest hour, but it's a worthy swansong and a great note to end upon. It's pretty tragic that I will not be able to satisfy my curiosity, one of how they would continue to develop their sound after this, that I felt after first listening to this. This is all we have.