The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die : Dreams of Being Dust
Let us play a game of comparisons. Put on, if you will, “Victim Kin Seek Suit,” the opening track of The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die‘s debut EP Formlessness. What notes do you pick up? To my ear, it’s that bleeding edge of post-rock and emo that was cutting edge about a decade or maybe a touch more before the band formed, competent iterative genre work that I liked at the time, and still, but something clearly cut within a specific mold of the world of emo. If anything, you could locate it fairly precisely at The Appleseed Cast, with their own mix of post-rock, emo and indie rock. Now, put on “Dimmed Sun,” the opening track of Dream of Being Dust. Is that… Between the Buried and Me? Between the arpeggiated synths and the particular descending clean vocal line, the heavily compressed and distorted guitars and, well, the heavy truncation of the delicate layers of many players down to the bludgeoning approach to space we might associate more with Dillinger Escape Plan or Genghis Tron, TWIABP sound fundamentally like a totally different band.
This turn to the more extreme wings of punk and the more progressive wings of metalcore sustains itself over the record. For instance, take “Beware the Centrist,” a song that is unabashedly political if not always legible in a specific way (those lines about echo chambers and keyboard warriors could go either way), but is just as undeniably driven by a hardcore punk arrangement and sense of pure verve. Meanwhile, “No Pilgrims,” easily the best song on the record especially with a haunting closing line of the chorus in “generating dust and swallowing capsules / nothing after,” takes a cinematic and progressive approach to metal and hardcore, containing a bit more of that BTBAM flair cut against a broader and more cinematic approach with those dramatic chord choices. This is a turn that isn’t entirely unprecedented; Illusory Walls, their previous record, made a decisive turn toward progressive metal, if holding back enough to not go full Dream Theater as much as I would love to hear that. But even one album before that on Always Foreign, we can hear TWIABP dropping some of the naive playing that marks emo and punk of a certain strain for something cleaned up and marked by not just more deliberate songcraft but production to match. It was time—their earlier work, a deep pleasure, had achieved itself and the band had the good sense to turn the corner rather than mine the same ideas to diminishing returns.
Tracks like “Dissolving” and “For Who Will Outlive Us” lean in toward shoegazing tonal choices but enmeshed as they are against the more metallic cuts, they read less like pure iterative genre work and more a conduit for meditation on death consciousness. Eugene Thacker and Ray Brassier write about these topics often, as did Emil Cioran way back when, the post-Buddhist fixation on the tragedy of embodiment. Great goth music crosses a barrier between memento mori and more abstracted and philosophical meditations on the eternal nature of death, its infinite finality, its perpetuity, and how this in turn conditions the shape of life and experience. TWIABP is obviously not a goth band, but these fixations which occur across the lyrical span of the record clearly touches on the “why” of the sonic shift as well. Gone now entirely are those major key almost folksy layered melodies. The yearning endemic to emo has been replaced by a paranoia more easily associated with the chronically ill wondering whether this or that hospital stay will be their last.
The melodic choices for some of these cuts can, at times, be a bit cloying, leaning toward something akin to radio rock choices, and the progressive and metallic ends both could stand to be more adventurous. But this is a critique made out of excitement, not chastisement. When this record works, like on the aforementioned “No Pilgrims” or on the meditative post-metal cut “Reject All and Submit,” it works. The advancements made over the past two records prior to this have slowly overhauled the band entirely. As they get more in touch with this style, leaning deeper into those haunting lyrical turns paired against their obvious and pleasing socialist political pulse, as well as bolder touches of extremity, will serve only to further bloom the flower. Dreams of Being Dust on its own leaves room for growth, but with time could very easily be looked back as the strong beginning to an exciting road. It’s a pleasure not just to be delighted by the turn in a band’s vision but to see even more fruitful vistas ahead.
Label: Epitaph
Year: 2025
Similar Albums:
