review: Hope Drone

Hope Drone

Void Lustre

Moment of Collapse/Sludgelord Records

30 August 2019

Hope Drone has put together a well-paced album that does not overwhelm as much as it would if the music were not arranged as it is. In other words, this album would be boring, difficult, pretentious and/or disjointed if the band did not sequence it as they did. Now, just to clarify, this album is pretentious and difficult, but oh boy it could be worse, way, way worse for the audience. It is five songs in 64 minutes of extreme metal with lots of blasting parts and plenty of dissonance, and also slow segments. This is what they did right. They seem to have asked themselves: (1) Are we trying to confuse the listener as much as possible in order to prove that we are talented and intelligent? Or, (2) Are we trying to make songs that are challenging but still interesting to the listener?

They chose option number two. The album requires an extreme amount of patience. Essentially, the band decided to give the listener the impression that the music is mostly blasting extreme metal, by often beginning the songs with blasting and intensity, and keeping it up for long periods of time, but once the songs really get going you are going to find out that there are other things going on.

From the first album in 2015 they established that they are a “post-metal” band; therefore, with the first song they basically were under the obligation to show that they still got it, and have not turned into something else. The first song is more than 13 minutes and it begins in a most yoga metal way possible: one lonely guitar string is slowly plucked and eventually a lonely drum begins softly to fade in from a distance. It’s not until three minutes later that it feels like multiple strings are strummed, but things actually get slower just when you thought it might pick up, but then the slow, desperate growling enters and this all sounds like slow doom extreme metal. At about six minutes a slow and lonely melody enters the space and takes over. Awesome. Now, right around the 7:30 mark the band is signaling blasting extreme metal, and eight minutes in, the blasting is going on until about 9:30 when it backs off a bit, but the extreme metal is still ruling the space, and will do it until the end.

The second song begins exactly like the first one ended: blasting extreme metal, mostly closer to black metal than any other genre. This second song is headbanging metal pretty much the whole way. Then the third songs hits and it is blasting extreme metal again, but it doesn’t stay that way. Things will slow down, get melancholic, get doomy, get spacey, fast and frenetic, and everything in between. However, the reason it does work is how it is all sequenced; the band is always careful to remind the listener that this is a heavy metal band that rocks. Maybe they don’t blast all the time, maybe they are not the most brutal band, but this album is very much extreme metal, despite the fact that this album is supposedly post-rock and post-metal, as if to suggest that it is really not metal music. What is not up for debate for anyone that does bother to hear this entire album is that there is has an abundance of fast, and blasting extreme metal, and to state otherwise is simply not factually accurate.

Is the album difficult? Yes. If it weren’t, this review would have been ready weeks ago. Is the album too long? Way too long! But wait a minute now, what if the band in question is not going to make another album in half a decade or so? Is it still too long? Ah, well, then story changes. If you like the album, but you’re not going to get another one in a long time, then the listener might end up feeling completely different about this hour of music. Hope Drone sends you greetings from the year 2025, when the third album will be ready.

hopedrone.bandcamp.com