Godseyes - ‘Progress//Regress’ review
Godseyes
No Sleep Records is the perfect label for Long Island mob Godseyes. Today, the NY five-piece release Progress//Regress, an absolute racket of a debut LP.
Content-wise, you can expect to feel a sense of turmoil and internal mystery. As the group's first release post-Covid, there’s a lot of pent-up aggression coming out. The “Bill Haley” intro that leads into the opening song “Progress” seems to sum up the Godseyes style quite well. They’re hard to pin down stylistically; the first 3 minutes casts them as bastard cousins to Loathe, but instead of lounge samples they have 1900's Noire-style saxophone.
We have seen snippets of what Godseyes had in store with “Progress” and “Your Pardon”, which kick off the record, but this is far from a case of a band giving us all the good stuff in singles before the full album. Tracks like “Izabel (feat Francis Mark)” continue at frantic pace akin to Rotting Out, with a similar vocal style and excellent guitar work.
The album's midpoint is my favourite part. “Shed Your Wound” feels like the band's most complete track, with an old-school hardcore vibe. “The Comets” follows this - an ambient saxophone track with a producer's voiceover. It's a very intriguing/excellent inclusion as it lets the album breathe for a moment. This seems tailor-made for a live fill between songs. The track ends with the drums of “Two of Twelve” starting to fade in while the voiceover says “Beautiful Noise”. That phrase is a very apt and on-the-nose descriptor for Godseyes. “Two of Twelve” is a loud and anthemic song that ends with a sample of Daniel Day-Lewis from There Will Be Blood. This seems odd but also fits well as the song is all rise and intensity, declaring “I won’t take this back”. This album has a lot of intent.
The only thing that can follow a line that won a man an Oscar is the “second-half-of-the-title” track “/Regress’. The track listing here is excellent, as these songs evoke a sense of decline from here on. The fills in the instruments seem to build before halting, the guitars flatline, and we hear the lyrics “But I refuse to be / A product of broken men / I am not the same” before a final crushing breakdown. Following that is the only single yet to feature - “Memories in Blue”. This track in particular is a case of hardcore having more to it than meets the eye. When played live the vocals seem made for a crowd to be singing it back. While some hardcore songs can leave the listener wanting more than a mosh, Godseyes have the ability in songwriting and building ambiance that pays dividends.
The album's final moments are full of even more left turns. The penultimate track “Eighty Five Springs” is made up mostly of foreboding, building instrumentals, and ritualistic voiceover like an impending doomsday before the vocals drop in to begin sending us home with one key message - survival (2020 anyone?). “Never Found Again” completes Progress//Regress and is a romp back through the assets they’d shown us in the album. With some excellent riffs and intense vocals, this is a blaze of glory before Godseyes fade out to a saxophone track and a recording of people discussing instrumentals, before ending. This is an odd way for the LP to end; it was a swift curtail and the quality of the voice recordings gives it an almost odd, found footage aura. As a listener, I was asking “Is this going somewhere?”
The pre-release materials for this album mentioned that the lyrics touch on procrastination. Personally, the album actually achieves the opposite. This seems like a story of two halves - the “Progress”, and then “Regress”. For an album designed around grief and uncertainty, this channels that as a purpose.
Progress//Regress from Godseyes is out today via No Sleep Records and available on all good streaming platforms. Godseyes are returning to the Amityville Music Hall for an album release show on Oct 6th.