(The Greek band Bitter Loss released their second album last April, and DGR has gotten around to reviewing it in the following paragraphs.)
Greece’s Bitter Loss is a band who have sat on the backburner for a little while, joining an honored class of groups who’ve not been done right by my personal gauge. Forever in a stasis of being promised a discussion but never quite reached even though they would’ve been fully deserving of their own articles were it not for life and work continually planting their foot on my throat. Thus the continued olive branch extension and attempt to make amends continues, and Bitter Loss’ album The Futile Dream Of Being deserves just as much spotlight as any other – even if in truncated form.
Thrash is a hard genre to quantify and write about these days given its existence being so integral to heavy metal’s cultural explosion over the years. As with many of the initial foundations of a music style, thrash can often feel as if it has been frozen in amber and evolution has long since sailed by – reducing it to a constantly repeating collection of tropes and circle-pit starters, sometimes entry level and otherwise unwilling to change without fearing the offense made to the old guard.
Obviously that isn’t the case, and as with any genre that has been around for a while it has splintered off into its own subfactions – some more fascinating than others in the sheer amount of musical virtuosity required – and many of those can be lively and vibrant even when it seems like the main umbrella is being held up by a collective of aging pillars sticking to what they know is best and true.
It does newer groups a disservice in that sense, in that they are often overlooked or have to work doubly hard just to be noticed, but there’s a case to be made for those willing to offer themselves up as tribute to the style to keep it alive by unleashing their own take on it – whether that be piles of influential altars being visited, mutations on recognized form, or playing to a blueprint long since codified.
Bitter Loss are up to a combination of all three on their newest album – well, “new” as in having released in April, but you know how this goes. The Futile Dream Of Being is a thrash album at heart, full of the aforementioned circle-pit language and denial of authority, yet the band play so well to expectations that they walk away with a rock-solid take on the overall genre. Bitter Loss have a long list of checkpoints to reach if they want to play in the sandbox of their thrash forebears and the two-piece more than meet those while also propelling forward on their own musical journey.
The band’s willingness to don cape and sword and go adventuring into darker woods on The Futile Dream Of Being is appreciated as well. Across eight songs, Bitter Loss have plenty of time to raise the ghosts of groups like Exodus and early classics, but that only happens because it is integral to their music’s DNA, not because the band find headway in a river of nostalgia in order to grab attention. As the title might suggest, The Futile Dream Of Being comes from influences and subject matter much darker, and you’d hardly be shocked to know that Bitter Loss’ two musicians have steeped their music in grindcore and punk aesthetics. If nothing else, they recognize the consistent core among so many groups like themselves and thus blend them together into The Futile Dream Of Being, so that you don’t often find yourself shifting your feet hoping they pick it up sometime soon.
Of the eight songs present, most hew towards a concise and sharp four minutes but Bitter Loss do have a couple of longform epics in the tracklisting as well. They’re all positioned right at the center of the album, with “Barren Fields”, “Family Grave”, and “For Those Behinds The Walls” all sailing past five minutes. None of them reaches that length because the band are stretching either, coasting by on a wall of sustain and super-slow riff work. Bitter Loss create a solid mix of mid-tempo groove and up-tempo guitar-set-aflame style of riff-work within those three songs.
“Barren Fields” starts off immensely sinister before morphing into something deceptively catchy instead and each “tone shift” taking place within “Barren Fields” finds itself coupled with lead guitar melody and soloing pushed way to the forefront. “Family Grave” and “For Those Behind The Walls” follow in a similar tack as well, which again, thankfully, means there’s more opportunity for Bitter Loss to tear the paint off the walls with screeching guitar rather than dulling their own blade to dance on the fine line of dynamics and boredom.
The old school and punk-inflected thrash beatdown of “Rat Race” is self-explanatory by title alone. You could have the situation of “A thrash band wrote a song called ‘Rat Race'” and take a solid guess at what it would sound like. You won’t be far off by what you’re imagining either, but Bitter Loss do a lot of solid crossover-genre work in the opening of the song before settling into recognizable form. There’s a touch of death metal, a little bit of punk snottiness, and a lot of throat-tearing barks within “Rat Race”.
“In The Enemy’s Path” is equally death-infected and its late arrival by hefty-double bass roll is much appreciated. The mid-segment of The Futile Dream Of Being trends towards Sinister – both as general descriptor of sound and direct influence – and “In The Enemy’s Path” throws the album well over the edge. It’s not so much death metal grunting and blastbeats into oblivion here but it does have plenty of crashing rhythm-section work, and the back half of the album benefits from it because you still have the sense that it has its arms around your throat like the earlier segments did.
The Futile Dream Of Being performs a surprisingly deft dance given its “drunk bull unleashed upon a shopping mall” nature. Fusing a handful of different genres together so that Bitter Loss are not fully pigeonholed within a subsect of thrash metal, The Futile Dream Of Being justifies the band as a crossover act and a gateway between punk, death, grind, and thrash. In that way, the pair behind Bitter Loss are more interested in music as weapon than music as prescribed form, and thus reach for anything available to them if they are justified in getting their point across.
The Futile Dream Of Being found itself cast into a roiling sea of metal earlier this year and among the many hundreds of releases out thus far, it still fights a mighty battle for your attention. The album gets by on a lot of dedication and passion, felt in each song, such that you find yourself just as curious to see how Bitter Loss fight their way through each song as they seem interested in figuring out how next to traverse another four-to-five minutes of guitar-part-car-pileup. The Futile Dream Of Being is not a release that can be seen from space by sheer glow of polish from experience or production, but it is loud enough that it could at least be heard at the edge of the vacuum.
https://bitterloss631.bandcamp.com
https://www.facebook.com/bitterlossband/
https://www.instagram.com/bitter_loss_band