HOSTILE ARCHITECTURE review - Harrowing, as it Should Be

(Reviewed by Melody Werner)

Hostile Architecture is a 2022 album by Scotland-based avant/RABM band, Ashenspire. I'm going to cut to the chase, since this is not a fun album, nor will this be a fun review. I still think you ought to listen to this record regardless, for two main reasons: 1) this may very well be the greatest album of this year, and 2) it is almost surely the most important one. This is a devastating deconstruction of the horrors wrought by capitalism and its fundamental inhumanity. Even as an ardent communist, I was still shook to the core by the rousing performances and blistering lyricism across the board, but I'll get to that more later. But this is an album that touches on something very close to me as someone who has spent some weeks on the streets: the ways in which architecture and cities are designed deliberately so as to be painful to homeless folks. Yeah. I said this wasn't going to be fun.

Hooks simply do not exist in the haunting halls of Hostile Architecture. While there are moments of beauty to be found in the instrumentals, especially when the violin and saxophone kick in, they are as fleeting as the nights spent stargazing on a sidewalk because you have nowhere else to go. And likewise necessary in making the record weatherable. Otherwise, the record hangs in a distressing sense of an all too familiar disaffection in the face of such overwhelming, normalized cruelty. A week or so ago, I was hanging out with a friend of mine and his family in Daytona Beach. A woman, likely living on the streets herself (considering how she seemingly carried everything on her), screamed as we drove past her. The sky above had opened up and began pouring a crushing rain. Do you ever think about those people without shelter when it storms? Having been in her situation, I know exactly how bloodcurdling it is—and I cannot speak to if anyone in Ashenspire has stared this darkness down their own eyes, not being of the sort to pry, but my point is that no other album before has felt so spot-on in its depictions and condemnation of this world that leaves so many out to the storm.

For essentially the entire ~40 minute runtime, I felt such a physical pressure on my body itself. This is not the first time black metal or d-beat has had me in this position, but rarely has it felt so personally affecting. Other albums that have made a pit well in my stomach, such as Backxwash's I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES and Svalbard's When I Die, Will It Get Better?, I am seeing someone else's trauma. Nothing wrong with that of course, but it's sure as fuck different to gawk at something that so mirrors my own unprocessed trauma. In a way, it's cathartic to hear someone saying what I'd already been thinking—the continued existence of homelessness in the imperial core is too perfectly woven into capitalism structurally to be anything but deliberate.

Hostile Architecture has more to say about the world than just the dire scourge of homelessness, delving lyrically into themes such as capitalist realism, misogyny, and capitalism on the whole. Those lyrics singe with the polemical vocal performances of Alasdair Dunn, who absolutely murders on the mic. He has a cadence to his... shouts, I suppose, since it sure as fuck ain't singing, that is absolutely compelling.

So yeah, I'm just in awe of Hostile Architecture. I could talk about how it's not going to be for everyone, but I hate when people say that shit—nothing is for everyone, other than Planet Earth (Nazis, TERF's, and other fascists do not count in "everyone" there). All I know is that this album is one I look forward to returning to when I feel like I can handle it again. For now, however, this gets an obvious 10/10.

Masterpiece

Summary:

Hostile Architecture is raw, relentless, and one of the greatest albums I've ever heard, tackling matters that need to be thought of more.

disclosure: after listening to the album, but while writing this review, I found out that my good friend Ru had played alongside the Ashenspire folks with his old doom metal band Atragon quite a few times. this does not change my opinions of the record in the slightest, I'd honestly guessed that he'd know a fellow Scottish band in the RABM scene and was looking forward to chatting with him about Ashenspire. but yeah, just being upfront with you.