Ordinary Corrupt Human Love

Deafheaven have not just made one of the best metal albums in recent memory, they’ve made one of the best albums of the decade, full stop. It’s a powerful, honest record, and further proof that music always has new places to travel.

Clarke, McCoy and co have made one of 2018’s most ambitious and urgent albums.

As always Deafheaven are anything but ordinary.

Ordinary Corrupt Human Love has moving, emotional pieces and sharp performances bolstered by a band clearly stretching out of its comfort zone successfully. The album is a refreshing new shade of their sound without abandoning the band’s core mechanics.

While New Bermuda was an exceptional album, it felt like a reaction to all the hate that came with Sunbather, as if they felt they had something to prove to themselves. Here, they’ve made a sun-drenched California metal album and offer no apologies for it. Ordinary Corrupt Human Love is Deafheaven doing what they want for themselves.

Ordinary Corrupt Human Love takes the strengths of its predecessors and refines them even further, which results in a dynamic emotional and musical experience that previous Deafheaven records came close to achieving, but never quite like this.

They’ve experimented with vocals, concentrated their musical chemistry, further polished their production, and tweaked their songwriting so that the transitions between movements in their songs are less sheer cliff-faces of fury and more lithe passages. All this, combined with some of the best songs they’ve ever written, makes Ordinary Corrupt Human Love the band’s most irrefutable credential as a leader in modern Rock.

Human Love is Deafheaven’s subtlest, prettiest music, and it aims for a different kind of transcendence. For all the influences their music conjures, you’d never mistake these songs for any other band.

Almost every song here seems to operate in a constant state of crescendo. But only the most stubborn traditionalist could deny how close Deafheaven often gets to the higher plane of its name.

Deafheaven is a ambitious heavy rock band, a gathering of innovative musical minds, and one of the very best guitar bands on Earth. Ordinary Corrupt Human Love is strong evidence of all three.

On OCHL they’re keen to take risks, side step that familiar territory and play with the formula. That consistent need to innovate and grow is what makes Deafheaven so divisive, so unpredictable and so extraordinary.

With its intermittent clean vocals, abundant alt-rock solos, and near-constant warmth, Ordinary Corrupt Human Love qualifies as Deafheaven’s most accessible effort thus far, not to mention one of 2018’s most universally-palatable collections of heavy music.

Ordinary Corrupt Human Love isn't going to change detractors' minds about Deafheaven. Instead, with its searing depictions of emotional and spiritual struggle in a relentlessly ambitious musical presentation, it should attract a new legion of listeners as well as deliver assurance and solace to those who found their earlier records so compelling.

On just seven songs that run a little over an hour, Deafheaven have finally achieved what they’ve been striving towards for the better part of a decade: true post-metal fusion.

Deafheaven’s brilliance has long been hung upon the pursuit of a truth, like documentarians before they hit the edit suite. These songs are filthy, dank, often devoid of light, but like a weed emerging from a pavement’s crack, there’s something resembling hope there. A suggestion that maybe there’s something more.

Yet another excellent album from the Bay Area metallers, and long may it continue.

The fact that the album kinda sounds like so many things, very few of them usually adjacent to the genre, sits at the crux of the album's aspiration. Ordinary Corrupt Human Love is a critical reminder to card-carrying loyalists and new inductees alike of their own agency; that it's potentially revelatory, not sacrilegious, for the spectrum of black metal to include things outside of its purview.

The San Francisco five-piece remain unforgiving epic, vocals mostly descendant from that same raspy wraith lineage. [Aug 2018, p.108]

Deafheaven finally look comfortable in their many different skins, their opposing worlds gliding together seamlessly, able to change between brutally heavy and light as air in seconds.

Deafheaven have flourished magnificently here. Not just by making a god album, but by creating something that perfectly captures what they have become--a genuinely brilliant creative force unencumbered by genre, going wherever they will. [7 Jul 2018, p.53]

The California quintet is as comfortable submerging itself in cheesy beauty as it is in conjuring mayhem, all in service to the neo-poetic lyrics of singer George Clarke. That boundary-free approach makes the band’s fourth album, Ordinary Corrupt Human Love (Anti), both a divisive and energizing listen.

While Deafheaven do their best to coalesce their efforts on OCHL, it’s the bigger moments that resonate most satisfyingly. It’s not perfect, but on this evidence, the Cali-based group are still one of today’s most stimulating metal bands.

Ordinary Corrupt Human Love is a waypoint in an increasingly divided world of niche cultures and categorisations, and it’ll capture the imaginations of those secure outside their comfort zones while further alienating detractors. Mission accomplished.

At times, the band's genre-bending excursions sometimes result in slightly deformed arrangements that are impressive in scope but not in efficiency. But that shouldn't deter one from Deafheaven's wondrous and impressionistic creation. It is, like most of their polarizing body of work, equal parts off-putting and fiercely inclusive.