An Autumn for Crippled Children - Try Not to Destroy Everything You Love (2013)

Always improving with each release, An Autumn for Crippled Children (AAAFCC) delivers one of the most sonically complex releases of 2013 with “Try Not to Destroy Everything You Love”. Not relying on technical virtuosity, but rather a perfect layering of intense elements, this album is further expands on the band’s melancholic Post-BM / Shoegaze sound with lush guitar arrangements and brilliant atmospheric elements.

Opening with the intense “Autumn Again”, we have immediately a wall of dramatic synths and a throbbing bass guitar line that is instantly complemented by the band’s shoegazing guitars. Inserting back and forth Black Metal riffs into the melting pot, AAAFCC quickly establishes the sonic power of this release. The harsh vocals are excellent as always, and the underlying melancholic passages of tracks like “The Woods are on Fire” and “Never Complete”, allow their thick sound to take many different shapes.

TThe album title track features a very mellow build-up and the cool incursion of spoken audio samples into the mix. Everything is perfectly layered to create a massive wall of sound that is unrivaled by any similar band. Other more experimental tracks further expand the band’s sound into Post-Metal/Rock territories like on “Hearts of Light”, “Avoiding Winter”, and the catchy “Sepia Mountains for Her Lament”. There are also very faint underlying Synth-wave/Dark-wave influences in tracks like “Closer” and “Starlit Spirits” that further expand the band’s atmospheric range in this release.

As “Quiet Evenings” brings this release to a close, we are definitely impressed on how much more can An Autumn for Crippled Children add to their sound to make it more punishing and explosive. The band’s atmospheric elements are unrivaled and they continue to further expand them into a huge wall of sound that enshrouds this excellent release. If you like Atmospheric Post-Black Metal with tons of Shoegazing, look no further and get a copy of “Try Not to Destroy Everything You Love”.

Label: Aeternitas Tenebrarum Musicae Fundamentum

Release: December 2nd, 2013

Genre: Post-Black Metal / Shoegaze

Country: Netherlands