Album of the Week: RITUALS — Deaf Havana
URY Music’s Will Knights reviews Deaf Havana’s fifth LP RITUALS, your Album Of The Week.
We are constantly being told that guitar music is dead, or at least, it is dying a slow and un-glorified death. I have never understood that line of thought. Yes, rock no longer has the mainstream appeal or commercial success it had ten, fifteen years ago, and yes its ethos has been adopted into a wider range of genres including R&B and rap, but ‘guitar music’ is not dead. Name a group or artist that does not feature a guitar in their sound. I bet you could only think of a handful. Rock groups have had to search for a new identity in order to remain competitive and relevant in the modern music scene of late, and few have had quite such a dramatic transformation as Norfolk’s own Deaf Havana.
On their new release RITUALS, the band have finally transitioned into the pop-rock group that was slowly emerging on their previous albums. Some have complained that the group has ‘sold out’ in a way because of this, that they have forgotten their punk/post hardcore roots. I for one think this new sound suits them best. Deaf Havana has not been a hardcore band since their debut studio release Meet Me Halfway, at Least. That was back in 2009. Since then they have slowly developed a more soft-rock sound, incorporating other instruments such as organs and orchestral arrangements into their music, and now they have fully developed into pop-rock. I have always thought that lead singer James Veck-Gilodi (who stepped up to lead singer after the departure of original singer, Ryan Mellor, after their first LP) has been more apt at writing pop songs, as evidenced by his fantastic songwriting on the band’s previous albums, and I am extremely pleased to see him penning some great, catchy pop-rock material here.
While the band’s sound may have changed over the years, Veck-Gilodi’s voice and lyricism has been a constant foundation for the group. He has always been able to combine catchy and sticky hooks with truly personal and emotional themes. On RITUALS, he continues the themes of redemption from addiction and destructive attitudes from the group’s previous album, last year’s excellent All These Countless Nights, this time mixing it with bright, colorful production. This is the sound I always thought would suit Deaf Havana best, and for the most part they pull it off well, but unfortunately RITUALS is not a perfect album.
The album has a strong start. The short, atmospheric synth instrumental track ‘Wake,’ which opens up the album, instantly lets you know about the group’s newly developed sound of the record. This transitions straight into the fast and bright ‘Sinner,’ the lead single of the album, which has delightfully catchy and anthemic chorus, which I’m sure will be a great festival track this summer.
From here we go through the other singles for the album — the equally sticky ‘Ritual,’ followed by the slower, darker ‘Hell,’ which is easily one of the best tracks on the album, perfectly showcasing the group’s great songwriting, and is one of the best examples of how this new sound fits them so well. Unfortunately, from here in the track listing the quality sees a dip. ‘Holy,’ while undeniably catchy, verges on the cliché in its lyrics, and the subsequent tracks continue this trend of increasingly mundane and forgettable pop-rock songs.
While there are some bright moments in these tracks (I particularly appreciated the harmonies on ‘Pure’ and the acoustic elements of ‘Saviour’), there is just not enough variety in terms of themes and instrumentation on most of these tracks to make them particularly memorable. For me, each just seemed to discuss the negatives of alcohol addiction and how relationships can turn sourer. This can be interesting for a few songs, but it did get a little monotonous after a while. The songs ‘Fear’ and ‘Heaven’ for me were the most bland and forgettable. Most egregiously, they felt like filler.
However, RITUALS does have a very strong finish. The final two tracks feature a greater variety in terms of production and songwriting. The track ‘Saint,’ which discusses Veck-Gilodi’s relationship with his mother and the fear of death, was by far my favourite track on the album. It includes a choir on the choruses, and contains some really inventive instrumentation and distortion in the production. The short but sweet closing track ‘Epiphany’ continues the choral aesthetic, and brings the album to a brilliant, atmospheric close.
Overall, while RITUALS contains some very catchy and emotional summer pop-rock tunes, and sees Deaf Havana moving in the right direction, it is not a perfect album. For me it suffers from being over-blown in the middle, and honestly, it feels incomplete in places. Perhaps the group needed more than a year to fully realise their new sound and produce the record they were imagining. Deaf Havana are still an exciting emerging UK band, and I’m eagerly waiting to see how the grow in the future. In short, RITUALS is decent, but I cannot help think that it could have been great.
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