Her Nightmare - Come Anarchy, Come Ruin (Album)
» Sike Your Mind! - Camberwell Town Hall and Civic Centre, VIC - August 25, 2007
The new album from Her Nightmare, ‘Come Anarchy Come Ruin’, definitely ain’t for the faint hearted. Then again, I guess none of Her Nightmare’s songs really are. With an album cover of a black shadow (appearing to be a policeman in riot equipment but I could be wrong) striding away from a torched and burning building, with the album title printed in some sort of Olde English Gothic style at the bottom, potential buyers can pretty much gather that one for themselves!
Her Nightmare are one of the more recent additions to the Australian hardcore scene. A 6-piece from Melbourne, the band first signed up in only 2005 to Resist Records, known for their hardcore bands. This is their second full-length album after 2006’s ‘No Heaven. No Hell’. The band’s music is brutal, heavy, and right up in your face, sounding more similar to bands such as Terror and Carpathian than the more melodic hardcore of acts like Parkway Drive and I Killed The Prom Queen. There also seems to be a strong hatred of people in general running through the lyrics, with chants such as “Our misled ways will kill us all!”
The band’s name fits well, with the vocals of the singers sounding as if they could scream straight out of the depths of a child’s darkest nightmare. The harsh and heavy guitars provide a relentless propulsion to the music, which strides along at a steady, inevitable pace. The drumming and bass are turned down, as per usual with this tone of music, yet some complicated riffs can usually be heard in the background, providing a blunt edge to the cutting distortion.
One interesting innovation that Her Night have undertaken with ‘Come Anarchy Come Ruin’ is the addition of a brief meaning-behind-the-lyrics written into the liner book for each song. It’s great to be able to get some definite idea of what the band, or at least the lyricist, was thinking when they wrote the song. Top marks for that one.
All up, a strong effort from Her Nightmare to break out of the swirl of hardcore bands currently in Australia. With raw brutal power and confrontational up-font lyrics, this band might never get as much attention or as large a following as more melodic hardcore bands like Parkway Drive, yet Her Nightmare definitely bring something new and valuable to the heavy hardcore scene.
