Bulletsbetweentongues

Album review

This album came to me much like the band’s name itself, like a bullet viciously ripping its way towards rapture. I don’t remember exactly how I came across it, but I can’t forget the moment I heard that first song. To be honest, I couldn’t even understand whether or not I liked it because it was so confusing and overwhelming, the way the anxiety builds throughout the songs, the dissonant heavy chords, the guttural and screeching vocals, to the point it even became uncomfortable, but I still saved it to revisit later because something about it, despite its chaos, gave space to some kind of clarification. Something about it felt so perfectly right and exactly like what I have been wanting to hear. There is a comforting quality to the melodies reminiscent of something from childhood, the relative simplicity and almost twinkle to it, but it also contains something much darker and heavier, evocative to the introduction and materialization of fear that grows with age. My discomfort was only a shallow manifestation of finally hearing something similar to what I have been wanting to say. What seems to stick with me most though are the lyrics, and if I had the chance, I would love to know more about it, but for now “You are the sun, and I the earth beneath” is what I repeat when asked by friends to explain what draws me to them. That lyric holds the message central to the band’s album, unashamedly revealing it as a “love letter to life” as explained in the band’s documentary “The Lights Never Lie.” “In Rapture,” the first song I heard (and the first of the album), still remains my favorite. It goes everywhere it needs to go, expectations thrown out the window, and the track list mesmerizes me with its dynamic uncertainty. It stumbles through the guilt of mistakes and of things that are out of our control along with the regret and chaos in not knowing what comes next. Their music is cathartic, the fear within the songs purged through the energy put in, and in the end, “The Lights Never Lie” takes this ungraspable but utterly beautiful unique dark form.

Bulletsbetweentongues is a five-piece band from Denton, Texas. The dual vocals, from the guitarist Jade Lorenz and bassist Jackson Douglas, seem at once to both push and balance the other, almost playing the devil and angel on your shoulder. The two guitars from Brennan Shrestha and Liam McCabe fuel this dichotomy and hold the key to the constant change in melody, rhythm, and pace their music takes, and the drums, Joseph Adame, what holds and controls the tension created by them all. A wall of sound is constructed in a rage “step by step” until it eventually crumbles and provides a newfound clarity where one can finally affirm: “I will not die in my own shadow.” It’s hard for one’s eyes not to widen when hearing the music as it comes all together. This is truly a sound I haven’t heard before, something becoming harder to come across, and what I appreciate about this album is how it doesn’t stick to just one genre or sub-group within emo and hardcore. It borrows aspects from various components and creates this new concoction of violent and harmonious despair, which doesn’t make me feel the desire to categorize under a specific genre or label. Their music feels like not being able to finish a sentence, getting interrupted by your own obsessive thoughts, but yet because of this you manage to get to a certain point, still leading towards a more profound direction, and eventually arriving at that realization that can only be followed by silence.