Five years used to feel like a long time in music. Entire scenes have risen, consumed all and fallen away to be a nostalgic footnote (or an ever-lasting sea change) in the same length between Once Human‘s last release and Scar Weaver (earMUSIC), their re-birth of a third album.
Probably known more for the identity of their two main protagonists, vocal beast, the dextrous Lauren Hart, and former Machine Head and Soulfly six-stringer slash producer extraordinaire Logan Mader, the main challenges for the Once Human vehicle are presenting as a valid band and not just a two-person outlet, and to find the bitter (OH do not do sweet) spot that will allow their music to be as visible as their personalities.
Scar Weaver achieves this on both counts, proving the prep time spent crafting this third and defining release was time well spent indeed.
Always less straightforward than most misplaced assumptions would place them, Once Human deal in jagged aggressive contemporary metal presented in a wrap of sonic barbed-wire precision, with Scar Weaver more angular and more challenging than its predecessors. Nothing is easy, either sonically, in terms of song structures, or most of all, listening.
It is worth highlighting at this point that the obstinance is both deliberate and effective – this is an approach that has depth and cerebral intent behind it. Flawless dextrous guitar riffs are wrenched from the full range of the lower reaches of the neck of the guitar throughout the album – Mader is trying to do something different, interesting and challenging here, to create while pushing himself as a song-writing technician.
And whether it is the memorable, measured ‘Cold Arrival’, the bungee-taut, opaque glassy guitar-led Dimebag jiggery-pokery-sliding riffage of ‘Deserted’, the slower lurching aggression of the title track, or the menacing brooder that builds to a bruising meloDeath powerhouse that is ‘Erasure’, a track that expands into Alice In Chains vocal territory, Hart is of a similar mind – delivering barbed hooks that don’t comply with the expected, choosing to eschew the straightforward or the obvious choruses or melodic choices. This is particularly effective during the quirky hook-n’-lurch ‘Deadlock’, which comes across as Karen Crisis in peak Hollowing (Metal Blade) form battling with a guesting Robb Flynn.
‘Eidolon’ lives in a Jinjer-esque post-Meshuggah Tech Metal space, with Hart spicing up her powerful harsh vocals with some aggro-melodies before the song breaks out into a cool, proggy Steve Vai-esque solo, while ‘Bottom Feeder’ flies all over the place: four bars of grind assault opening into a looser nu-metal grunt, leading us to a more traditional chorus before a ridiculously metronomically tight alt-picking squeal break.
‘Where The Bones Lie’ is probably the most straight-forward, semi-anthemic track, well placed dynamically at the mid-album point, ‘Only In Death’ swirls a discordant guitar backdrop to a Nevermore type song with Damien Rainaud‘s bass running and rumbling, while ‘We Ride’ smacks the chops, a straight-up rage-filled Strapping Young Lad cover that is apt and appropriate and draws the comparison between OH’s intent to incorporate aggression alongside abnormality to Devin‘s secondary personality, a caffeine dose of speed and off-centreness that belongs well towards the tail end.
Deliberate, obtuse, and / or eccentrically finding their own niche; it doesn’t matter as coupled with a production job that gives Once Human a defined identity and confirms their sound, Scar Weaver is exactly the sort of record the band needed to make to ensure they matter and have a fist in the fight.
Buy the album here: https://www.ear-music.net/oncehuman
8 / 10
STEVE TOVEY