Architects
Hollow Crown
Century Media Records
26 January 2009
by Hugh Platt
When a record comes with as much pre-release buzz as Architects have garnered with Hollow Crown, it forces you to make a choice. You can embrace that hyperbole, throw yourself into the record with the reckless abandon of teenage sex-fumbles. You can feign stony indifference, betting on a fan-backlash against any perceived critical over-excitement. Or you can pretend that you’re listening to it in some sort of culture-vacuum, repeating to yourself that it’s “all about the music, maaaan.”
But you can’t do that with Hollow Crown. To try to deconstruct it is like trying to demolish enormous granite boulder with your teeth. This record is monolithic, refusing to allow enough critical purchase to tear off a chunk.
The immediate brute force of album opener, ‘Early Grave’, is as unexpected as a sucker punch from the Queen, but as damaging as if it had been delivered by the Six Million Dollar Man. Vocalist Sam Carter sore-lung screams are so raw that you’d think you couldn’t hear anything like them outside the deepest sub-basement of Guantanamo Bay.
Hollow Crown taps into some primal clock ticking in the back of the human brain, the downtuned mathcore rhythms feeling both familiar and at arm’s length within the same song. Whether experiencing the surge ‘Follow The Water’ takes in its final third, or the snapping barks of ‘Borrowed Time’, the entire album feel garrotte-taut, with every part bearing some barely-contained lethality.
Watch the video to ‘Early Grave’ by Architects
Great albums are as much a negative reaction to their surroundings as a positive culmination of influences. Those acres of beige-bland Brit-metal, saying nothing in a blank mess of cack-fingered riffs and affected screaming, are as much responsible in forcing the rise of Architects as the inspiration provided by Converge, Sikth, or Dillinger Escape Plan. So stuff being aloof, or trying to judge this as if it exists in a bubble all of its own – Hollow Crown is a beacon amongst the dross.
5/6
Architects – Hollow Crown tracklisting
Early Grave
Dethroned
Numbers Count For Nothing
Follow The Water
In Elegance
We’re All Alone
Borrowed Time
Every Last Breath
One Of These Days
Dead March
Left With A Last Minute
Hollow Crown
9 responses so far ↓
1 Future Hits 012: The Eyes Of A Traitor // Feb 23, 2009 at 3:45 pm
[...] Hertfordshire, UK Sounds like: A Textbook Tragedy, Chimaira, Architects Website: [...]
2 Twelve more names for Download Festival 2009 // Mar 17, 2009 at 12:44 am
[...] Crisina Scabbia-led Lacuna Coil, reformed rockers Skin, and the quite frankly awesome prospects of Architects and Parkway Drive. Anyone who caught the latter pair on the Altamont Never Say Die! Tour last year [...]
3 Future Hits 018: Your Demise // Mar 24, 2009 at 9:35 pm
[...] What bands do you consider to be your peers? Run, Pay No Respect, Architects. [...]
4 Hugh Platt // Apr 22, 2009 at 9:31 pm
I like this album even more than I did a few months ago. QUALITY.
5 Album: War From A Harlots Mouth - In Shoals // Apr 23, 2009 at 1:13 pm
[...] in part with a tauter, more clinical approach to riffs. It approaches the tech-death teasing Architects mastered for Hollow Crown, with tracks like ‘No High Five For A C.oward’ armed with [...]
6 Video: Architects - Follow The Water // Oct 17, 2009 at 11:18 am
[...] Crown was one of the first great records of 2009, and back in January we picked out ‘Follow The Water’ as one of the highlights. [...]
7 Anonymous // Nov 1, 2009 at 1:18 pm
does anyone know which two are the twins the middle 3 all look exactly the same in this picture
8 Raz // Nov 1, 2009 at 2:53 pm
I’d say it was the one in the centre and the one to his right.
9 Photos: Imperial Never Say Die! Tour @ Sheffield Corporation - 01 November 2009 // Nov 2, 2009 at 3:17 pm
[...] by last year’s mid-bill placed Architects, this year the tour also boasts Despised Icon, As Blood Runs Black, iwrestledabearonce, HORSE The [...]
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