Ashbringer

Ashbringer’s 2023 album We Came Here to Grieve was a pretty large departure from their previous work. When there’s a shift in the dynamic of the music a band has been known for it’s going to create some division amongst the existing fan base. Before this release, Ashbringer was known for lengthy songs and having a purely metal focus with emotional passages. With this latest release they introduced shorter songs, a more typical song structure, and gasp clean singing. 

Everyone is entitled to one’s own opinion on whether or not they enjoy something. Yet, if change can only be given a chance, what can be found within is something wholly Ashbringer. While they have made some changes to their formula, underneath it all, it’s still them. There's emotion here as well as heaviness. Something about the accessibility of this release has made the emotionality that much more raw and out in the open for all to bear witness to. 

That being said, not every song deserves the praise given above; change doesn’t happen seamlessly afterall. The track Unsaid is one of the lower points in the album. The opening and repeating riff throughout the song feels like Bad Company’s Feel Like Making Love from the 80s and it’s very distracting. This decision from the band was most likely not intentional, but it makes this track one that receives the skip treatment. 

Some tracks that really excel at showing off this new direction would be Pages, Gazed, Permanence, and Here. Within all of these examples contain slower moments, heightened moments of anger and sadness, as well as dynamic song structures. Gazed, for example, starts off with quiet clean guitars and clean singing for the first two minutes until it kicks into some distorted riffage then ebbs and flows between these states henceforth. 

There are also lyrical motifs found throughout the entire run time. This is a clear expression that the grief that is being felt consists, that the object of grief is the same, as progress is made from track one through ten. Speaking of track ten, the title track is pure emotion and really sums up and caps off this whole experience perfectly. There is almost no instrumentation apart from some droning sounds and eventually some intensely bashed drums. The spotlight here is on the vocals. This is grief at its purest and rawest form. Vocally, this is the most intense performance that can be heard on this record and probably many other records. It really feels like the vocalist pulled his heart out and let it bleed all over the recording equipment. Words cannot express this properly only experience. 

Ashbringer took a chance on change and mostly nailed it. It’s not a perfect album, but grief rarely is perfect. It’s messy and comes in unexpected waves. The record is best experienced with a free and dedicated forty five minutes to sit and really feel the emotions freely offered up by Ashbringer. The open expression of raw emotions can be something that is hard to take in for various reasons, but here the grief being expressed is artful as well as painful. We Came Here to Grieve did come here to grieve and grieve they did.

8.5/10