SINGLE REVIEW: DENSE ‘Fossilised’

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If you’ve been keeping up you will have realised that I am a fan of DENSE. Part of it is their live performances which are immersive, other worldly and sonically beautifully battering. But there’s another part to it. While every release has that essential DENSE-ness, they take that sound in different directions.

With ‘Fossilised’ the band take their distorted garage psych into post-punk and punk sounds. It’s angular, it’s angry, it’s aggression and frustration captured in a sound. It is, and I don’t exaggerate in the slightest, terrifying. And yet this is not, and you’ll remember I said that the band always retain their DENSE-ness, a featureless blast of sound; there are builds, there are waves of crushing distortion. And in that sound there are moments of subtleness in sound that amaze, that thrill. And the vocal, well my friends, this is not just a vocal it’s a performance.

And while the music is angry in itself the words put that anger in context. I’ll leave this to the band to explain “‘Fossilised’ tells a story that represents the feeling of countless setbacks in the modern world. Austerity, climate change, and conservative regression contribute to feelings of being buried beneath layers upon layers over the course of what feels like an eternity; immobilised, freezing and inundated. Just as the being in this story’s trapped state immortalises their final moment of freedom, this track serves a warning in whether we too wish to be encapsulated in this time forever or break the rock around us and push for change”.

The combination of words and music encapsulates those feelings of frustration, repression and restriction, the feelings of being silenced. It’s a track about the now, and for us now. It speaks of the feelings we have now. It’s powerful.

This is an incredible song with a sonic beauty in its brutality; that talks about us today, and putting those feelings so perfectly into music. Bloody hell, this is fantastic.

The info

DENSE are Charlie Fossick (guitars and vocals), Dylan Metcalf (bass) and Sam Heffer (drums). The band are well known for their explosive and manic live show, having performed at an array of venues such as Brudenell Social Club (Leeds), YES (Manchester), Adelphi Club (Hull) and the Victoria (London), alongside the likes of Prettiest Eyes (US), Flat Worms (US), Frankie & The Witch Fingers (US), Crows (UK) & Strange Bones (UK).

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Frank is the website guy for Local Sound Focus. Takes a lot of photos and loves writing about new music.