Nashville’s Chamber has generated a lot of buzz in the metalcore scene over the last few years, and for good reason. Their 2020 full length Cost of Sacrifice captured elements of the genre classics with intense chugging riffs, faster attacks, and a healthy dose of breakdowns with some hints of mathcore’s stop/start songwriting approach and complexity. After a surprise EP release last year, the band is back with A Love To Kill For and they’ve taken everything from their debut to its next logical level. The material is faster, darker, and goes for mathcore transitions a bit more frequently, but there are natural pauses and variation to the attack that makes individual tracks stand out. It may still remind you of a slew of metalcore and adjacent bands from across the 90s and 2000s, but Chamber continue to do it so well that it’ll only take a few spins for you to be windmilling around the room.
Where a lot of modern metalcore groups incorporate elements of post hardcore and the melodic side of the spectrum, Chamber goes for a purer approach that remains abrasive and dark no matter whether they’re going full speed or slowing things down for a moodier break. Songs hit hard and fast but don’t linger on one element for too long, and with a twenty-eight-minute run-time it’s clear that this band understands that brevity is key to having maximum impact. Earlier tracks like “Retribution” are great examples of this, as the song starts off with guitar and bass that offer chugs, squeals, and pick scrapes at a slightly faster tempo and transition over to a slower, almost beatdown style tempo before melody kicks in to create a dark and moody soundscape. Stylistically it reminds me of The Chariot, Coalesce, The Handshake Murders, and O' God, the Aftermath era Norma Jean with some other elements added in for good measure, and that’s quite the appealing combination. Compared to Chamber’s last full length the material here is going for a bit more complexity and the transitions can’t be easy ones to pull off with how spastic they are, but the band does it effortlessly. I love the way the songs can go from blast beats to chugging, dense breakdowns, and then over to a short melodic passage all in the span of one to two minutes, as it makes A Love To Kill For a wild ride. Admittedly some of the tracks fall into a slight formula with how they move between tempos and the sub-one-minute pieces feel like they could’ve been folded into some of the other songs rather than being standalone, but these are minor nitpicks. There’s a consistent wow factor from beginning to end, though on repeat listens “At My Hands”, “When Deliverance Comes”, and the title track stand out the most thanks to how well they overlay the bleak and tense atmosphere with all-out violence.
You’re likely to be focused on the over the top, ever changing nature of the guitar, bass, and drums the first time through A Love To Kill For, but the vocals are no slouch either and they began to jump out at me a bit more on subsequent listens. Jacob Lilly uses a lower growl/scream that is almost as dense as the instrumentation, and while it sometimes sounds like he’s in danger of being swallowed up by the sheer noise level being generated by the rest of the band his vocals always manage to break through. There are some moves into higher shrieks and screams at key points that keep the performance from feeling repetitive, the short length also helps with this. The pitch is a bit different, but the cadence of the vocals reminds me quite a bit of Sean Ingram from Coalesce. Two of the tracks bring in guests, with “To Die In The Grip Of Poison” featuring Boundaries’ Matt McDougal and “Devoured” featuring Khublai Khan TX’s Matt Honeycutt. With how quick these sections go they don’t jump out at me quite as much as guest spots on other albums do, but they still contribute some additional variety to an already chaotic performance.
As someone that lived and breathed everything metalcore in the early to mid-2000s before I got into other areas of metal and hardcore, Chamber’s chaotic and fluid approach to songwriting feels like it was written for my exact tastes. Thankfully there is substance beneath the surface, and the way these songs bludgeon and batter listeners before giving them slight melodic breaks results in some memorable moments. The “more of everything” approach seemed to be the right move here, as I expect I’ll be coming back to this one for another rapid-fire dose of metalcore/mathcore on a regular basis. A Love To Kill For is available from Pure Noise Records.
-Review by Chris Dahlberg