Envy – Recitation

Recitation is an apt title for Japanese hardcore band Envy’s fifth long player, invoking the scene of a dramatic storyteller with an audience in the palm of his hand; sitting, waiting and needing to know what happens next. Signed to Mogwai’s Rock Action label, the songwriting’s tense, dramatic strength is no real surprise. But Envy is something else.

Partly, it’s the Japanese language; vocalist Tetsuya Fukagawa could be reading his shopping list over the quiet parts and they’d still sound like a sad evocation of a strange and foreign world. But then there’s the music. It’s a rare band that can tether such beauty and brutality together for such long stretches.

Given the post-rock moniker, the lush cinemascapes are almost to be expected, but the rest is constantly refreshing and surprising, from the melancholic Your Hand to the At The Drive In-esque blast of Dreams Coming To An End. An emotionally affecting war-zone of a record. [PJ Meiklem]