- Deafheaven are a band that attract controversy, though you wouldn’t know it from the outpouring of enthusiasm for their new LP, Ordinary Corrupt Human Love. The controversy is actually pretty simple, easy to understand and I’d like to get it out of the way before dealing with the record, on its own terms.
Heavy music, like a lot of extreme, so-called underground styles, has a lot of rules about how it should sound. Reddit is full of petty despots who’re going to tell you just why any given band does or definitely, absolutely, definitively does not qualify for a particular sub-genre. Enter Deafheaven who, like any good middle-class kids, wanted to be as bad as they possibly could be; so of course they said, hell yeah, we’re black metal. Which is all well and good, but Deafheaven actually love to play a whole range of musical styles from post-rock to folk and shoegaze and, more than that, they even fronted a wave of such fusion outfits including other luminaries like genre-chameleons Windhand. Deafheaven don’t even tick many of black metal’s essential boxes - where’s the lofi production, tremelo picking or disturbing neo-nazi lyrics? Venom this ain’t.
So, as Ordinary Corrupt Human Love opens with You Without End and piano licks borrowed from Beethoven and leans, luridly into a lush, proggy epic that’s as much November Rain as it is anything else, well, at the very least you shouldn’t be surprised and only upset, if you really, really want to be. Proggy, if not glammy, may well be the most appropriate adjective for this record. Although there are definitely, glittery, glammy moments to be had. I know I’m not the only person who heard this who heard those opening bars and thought it was less Opeth and more Queen.
The meat of this record, however, in its ten-minute-plus songs like Honeycomb, Canary Yellow or Glint and it's prog-metal. The band use these spacious compositions to indulge in a variety of rhythms and moods. Really, the blast beats and absolutely feral screaming only come out for the most special occasions. More often you can hear the band indulging the wide dynamic contrasts and soaring grandiosity of postrock.
Even as the album quiets down into some almost dream-pop sounds, or that strange folk-rock duet with Chelsea Wolfe that is Night People, it’s almost like it’s worn itself out, but there’s still a tremendous feeling of solidity to the whole affair. At the very least, it’s a great job of tracking and perhaps more as if these huge songs themselves were a through-composed whole.
Nothing about Ordinary Corrupt Human Love feels controversial to me. Instead, it feels very finely measured and balanced; perfectly turned out. Right down to the glammy curlicues and piano licks, everything is in its place. You’d be very silly to quibble about what exactly all this is and miss just how immensely satisfying it actually is.
- Chris Cobcroft.