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Released on February 9, 2015 via Head of Crom Records
Honesty gets me – be it music, be it art. With From Nothing Comes Everything this debutant sludge/hardcore outfit from UK have done just that – produce an unrestrained, honest album.
“I forgot to live and bask in this moment.”
When Nats Spada cries out those words, you believe her. There is a thwarting sense of repentance that surrounds it, a sense of absolute, down-to-dust frustration on having lost at life, a sense of bereavement – her voice, in all its avatars, convinces you of it. The music is every bit unforgiving, heavy and heralds most of the banalities of the sub-genre and still Torpor‘s brand of hardcore-ish sludge or “sludgecore” if you will, is a cut above the rest with its no-holds-barred honesty and inventiveness. The music is not unidimensional, a curse that plagues most bands playing this kind of music, but has many heads, each head as invigorating as the other.
The music cycles from bits rooted in heavy repetition with great massy riffs clashing back and forth to lighter, contemplative moments that are as crushing in its spirit as its delivery, doing away with conventions and cultivating a singular sound that showcases the band’s hold on dynamics. The song-writing is fluid despite its shape-shifting nature – I’m not talking oddball time-signatures, I’m talking about the slew of moods and emotions these songs solicit. For a sludge album, this record goes through a hell lot. From Nothing Comes Everything is never dull.
Elephantine, cyclical riffs make up the rock-solid rhythm section of ‘From This Time’ and ‘Surrender To The Light’, the two songs that introduce the listener to the feral entity that is Torpor. The abject heaviness and the thundering bass-tone particularly could remind one of Swans in their early punk/noise days. Try not head-banging to ‘As Waves Crash’. The song with its unmistakable hardcore aesthetic is nasty and brutish. It is also the most fun song there is on this record if you are to believe me (also, is it just me or does Nats’ clean-singing remind you of Scott Hill? Debatable). The band hits home when it is its most visceral self, case in point – ‘Abandon’ and ‘Everything We Left Behind’, the last two songs on the album.
The songs on From Nothing Comes Everything, apart from sharing a common sensibility, have an unremitting undertone of resistance, this abeyant sense of wanting to break-out. Recorded, mixed and mastered by Wayne Adams, the album has a brash, weighted, industrial sound with enough muddiness thrown in to lend the music that tension. If this record is anything to go by, Torpor is a name that you’re going to hear more of in the coming years. This stuff is heavy.
