Album Review : Lorna Shore - Pain Remains (2022)
Say what you want about Lorna Shore, but they are one of the deathcore bands I can recognize ten seconds into any song. Their overbearing blend of styles is a little difficult to assimilate at first. Everything is so grandiloquent and in-your face, it’s meant to be experienced more than it is to be conventionally enjoyed. The blackened, symphonic crazy out-of-the-box deathcore on their 2021 EP … And I Return to Nothingness caught my attention though, so I decided to give their first album with vocalist Will Ramos a spin.
I am not sure how I would describe my feelings towards Pain Remains yet, but I would not use the word "disappointed".
For the uninitiated, the closest creative equivalent to Lorna Shore I can think about is film director Zack Snyder, who makes movie where everything is always epic and badass all the time. There's no buildup and as little storytelling as possible. It's so fucking intense that it's a little silly when taken out of context. That said, Lorna Shore are infinitely more interesting than Zack Snyder because of two things : 1) how they create dynamics in their song and 2) how fucking far into creative extremes they’re willing to go.
The first song on Pain Remains is a seven minutes scorcher called Welcome Back, O’ Sleeping Dreamer that alternates between epic synth leads and Earth-shattering breakdowns that feel like a fucking titan is stomping on your skull. It sounds ridiculous and borderline nonmusical, yet it works somehow. These breakdowns are particularly preposterous, consisting almost solely on drums and Will Ramos snarling like a demon, it's like the song is broken in half by an Earthquake.
It doesn't sound evil or threatening at all. It's borderline… athletic? If anything Welcome Back, O’ Sleeping Dreamer is music to mosh your life away to. It awakens something nasty in you.
Once you're absolutely blasted away by this awesome opening, you're already confronted to Pain Remain's biggest problem : when you're so fucking extreme right off the bat, where can you possibly go? Into the Earth and Sun//Eater are fun songs that stand out on their own, but that offer much of the same thrills. The latter is a little better textured that the former with melodic death metal guitar leads and Ramos' inhuman vocal performance that range from black metal shrills to guttural squeals that almost sound pitch shifted.
Lorna Shore are very conscious of how ridiculously extreme they sound and they use all sorts of clever ideas to create interesting dynamics in their songs. Outside of breakdowns-that-are-barely-even-breakdowns, they use symphonic elements and guitar melodies in order to layer their songs and give them definite identity. Cursed to Die is a good example, with the same riff carrying on synth and guitar throughout its entirety. It goes as hard as everything else they do, but it’s also unmistakably different.
I had a weak spot on Pain Remains for the song Soulless Existence which I think is the one that breathes the most. It eventually goes as fast as anything they do, but the tempo ramps up gradually and works in the desired atmosphere great. It has this killer, crunchy mid-tempo riffs that keep circling back and these longs, swirling, amotspheric melodies that texture the emotion in Will Ramos' voice. A song about feeling damned cannot always go a 500 miles an hour. Being damned would kick too much ass otherwise.
One can't talk about Pain Remains without addressing the actual Pain Remains trilogy of songs at the end of the record, though. There's definitely a desire to go elsewhere with an ambient intro and persistent synth lead for the first chapter Dancing Like Flames, but that I feel like that obsession with extreme sound assaults handcuff the creative and emotional side of the song. At heart a trilogy about a passion burning too bright, it's really hard decipher any kind of emotional or creative progression from one chapter to another.
I like these songs to a certain point and they each have elements that differentiate them, but I would've loved Lorna Shore to go deeper into each one of them. There’s spoken words passages that last like 10-15 seconds. There’s violin at the start of In a Sea of Fire, it would've been nice to built on that and it does… right into that onslaught again. I got nothing against it. It's part of their sound, but I pulling every extreme will only lead them so far. The only thing they can expand on is the dynamics of their songs and there IS space.
So what is the thing about Lorna Shore doesn't quite get over the line? I believe it's the drums. Nothing against their drummer Austin Archey who can do the brutal stuff as good as anyone else, but I believe Lorna Shore reach a more sustainable sound when they're going to spot relying on their crazy breakdowns and drum fills in order to texture their sound. They have the vocalist to go elsewhere and the desire to explore all sorts of creative extremes. There are so many places they can go from here.
*
There's a lot to like about Pain Remains, but it's sonically so voluminous that I'm not sure that I'll come back to it more than one song at a time. All the songs have a certain standard of quality, but you've experienced the entire bouquet of what Lorna Shore has to offer after only one. Two perhaps if you're having a really bad day and need to blow off steam. Ramos, Archey, Adam De Micco, Andrew O'Connor and Michael Yager are interesting musicians, but this current sound is just the start. It has to be.
