For fans of Leather.Head, Snag., The New Eves, off-kilter singer-songwriter, and that gnawing emptiness you’ll spend a lifetime trying to understand, Our Songs Are Spells by offwithhishead! explores rage through a deeply varied take on the skramz formula, bringing in folksy verses and sung vocals to fill out the space between emotional peaks and troughs. Homespun vocal harmonies and strum guitars serve as that intermediate point between twinkly lows and distorted highs, with each sung statement adding to a story of desperate longing which constantly ends in interpersonal tragedy. As these stories hit a frustrated climax, intensity flares to bring this EP to the full heights of a skramz meltdown, at times even retaining those harmonies as the vocals turn to screams and the band reaches that high-tempo explosiveness we expect from the genre. All the while, that post hardcore harmonic dissonance seeps in from every direction, uniting the high and low into one struggle, a need which we as people will by definition never successfully fill.
