Album/EP

Earthbound - Evergreen (EP Review)

Walladmin

Heavy Metal Wordsmith

/10

Sep 1, 2020

7 min read

Earthbound- Evergreen EP
Released September 2nd, 2020

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Everyone needs an escape, especially to pass the time at the moment and distract from the craziness of the world. For Melbourne band Earthbound, that escape is gaming which they say brings them together. For their latest EP Evergreen, they wanted to immortalise their favourite games and memories of playing them, all to the backdrop of furious metalcore.

Starting the EP off is the single ‘Eden’ which dropped last week and no the lyrics don’t go “In the garden of Eden honey / don’t you know that I love you?” If you don’t get that reference, we can’t be friends. This song is my favourite from the EP and an incredible way to start it off. ‘Eden’ is super fast-paced and boppy with an incredibly catchy chorus. It starts the EP off with a bang with weaving technical guitar riffs from Jake Kershaw and Daniel Drawley and shows vocalist Tom Armstrong's flawless transitions between his furious screams in the verses and melodic cleans in the chorus. The bass from David Lawson and drums from Rhys Alexander are superb as well, and this is the level of instrumentation you can expect from all of the songs on this EP. The song is lyrically inspired by the events in Far Cry 5 but also touches on the dangers of religion with the fantastic breakdown saying "The sun kissed us with the promise of Eden / We really thought we had something to believe in."

From one furious song to another, next up is ‘Constellations’ which the band says is about the fourth instalment of the Elder Scrolls series Oblivion and talks about the idea that your stars can align and that every human has a destiny to fulfil. The chorus says "My fate was written in the stars / Destined for a truth that wasn't ours." The absolute highlight of this song is the crazy good breakdown!

Next up is ‘Thrive’ which talks about the feeling when everything is going well, but there's the paranoid voice in your head telling you it's too good to be true and won't last (oh man, can I relate!). The band says that this is reminiscent of Mario Kart when you're winning, but also in real life, you can achieve so much if you just push through this fear. All four of the songs on this EP are furious and heavy, but this one is the most frantic and heavy with more screaming than cleans, and the breakdown is so dirty!

To finish in the intense way it started, the last song on the EP is the title track ‘Evergreen’ and let me tell you the guitars in this song are wild! Keeping with the gaming theme, this song is about a war guitarist Jake and vocalist Tom while playing the game Civilisation and it feels like a war between them to see if the guitars or vocals can be the most furious. But then it breaks into a clean and soaring chorus, has a fantastic bass break and another breakdown that is by far the best of the EP. And that's saying something because every song has an incredible breakdown.

Earthbound now has a couple of releases and some fantastic singles under their belt, and you can tell that they are going places. My one thing about this EP is that it perhaps sticks to the same formula too much with each song. While they are really great songs, they sound quite similar and don't showcase a huge amount of variety. This is a great release, and there's no denying that Earthbound has a massive future ahead of them, I just hope that what we see from them next shows more of what they can do and has more personal Earthbound flavour to make them really stand out!