CASEY (UK) + GATHERERS (US) + ACRES (UK)

Casey (UK – Hassle Records)

Casey are a five-piece melodic hardcore band from South Wales. The band’s 2016 debut, Love Is Not Enough, was a raw and visceral exploration of vocalist Tom Weaver’s personal relationships. It was an open-heart surgery that examined his romantic and familial bonds, or their wreckage, in the context of his own mental health, to devastating effect.

2018’s follow-up, Where I Go When I Am Sleeping, is no less revealing. But instead of concentrating on what Weaver considers the same old topics of love and loss, the band – completed by Liam Torrance (lead guitar), Toby Evans (guitar/backing vocals), Adam Smith (bass) and Max Nicolai (drums) – instead turns its focus to the issues of Weaver’s own body and the main physical and mental afflictions that have dogged him for the majority of his life.

At the end of 2018, the band posted a statement announcing their farewell. “The time has come to say that although there are aspects of the band we all still love dearly, we have to be honest with ourselves, and admit that now is the right time to draw Casey to a close.”
Casey have no grand design, music is a labour of love.
https://www.facebook.com/Caseytheband/
http://www.caseytheband.com/

Gatherers (US – Equal Vision)

That there’s light at the end of the tunnel is a cliché often rolled out to those going through a bad time. But what if that’s not true? What if the darkness of that tunnel just stretches on forever and there is no light, no salvation, no hope? Because those are the circumstances of We Are Alive Beyond Repair, the third full-length album from New Jersey’s Gatherers – sonically and lyrically, it’s a bleak, brutal, nihilistic record that’s shrouded in such despair and anguish that there’s no chance whatsoever for escape. And that’s just how the five-piece like it.

“We wanted this album to be as ugly and as horribly truthful as possible,” explains vocalist Rich Weinberger. “It has this very human but flawed connotation to it. It’s very pessimistic. I was reading a lot of Sylvia Plath at the time we were writing this record and I just like that the fabric of our existence is very meek and it’s dull and, no matter what, nothing will ever get better. That was the angle I wanted to explore with this record. It’s the idea of being just being completely unfulfilled, that no matter how much time we put into this band it’ll never be self-fulfilling.”
https://www.facebook.com/gatherersband/
http://gatherersband.com/

Acres (UK)

Sad songs for sad dudes.
https://www.facebook.com/acresband/

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