ALBUM REVIEW: THE LIGHT WE CHASE BY BLOOM

Reviewed by Cecilia Pattison-Levi

The Sydney five-piece band Bloom (Jono Hawkey, Jarod McLaren, Oliver Butler, Andrew Martin, and Jack Van Vliet) has released a stunning album with ‘The Light We Chase’. This second album remains true to the melodic hardcore genre that Bloom champions. The 11 songs reflect the vulnerability that emotional turmoil, relationship breakdowns, struggles with trust, and wrestling with hopelessness can bring to life. The songs are Bloom’s most visceral collection to date, with guitar riffs and big drum beats colliding in a wall of sound. 

The album opens with a song to the band’s Sydney origins in ‘Belrose’. The song has a strong sense of the past. It begins with a gentle guitar melody paired with pure and clean vocals from Jono Hawkey before the song becomes darker and turns heavy. The raw emotion can be heard bubbling through the mix, and it explodes in ‘Forget Me Not’ with angsty energy right from the start. Then, ‘Out of Reach’ heads into the darker side of self-knowledge, while raging about fractured relationships and trust, while still managing to sound massive with huge bassline riffs pounding away.

The song ‘Keep You’ featuring vocals from Patrick Miranda (Movements) screams hit song and radio ready. The catchy melody with the great vocals brings a new template of grunge rock to the album. The heartache with lyrics like: “You haunt everywhere I go” is just fantastic. The band returns to the heavier sounds with screamed vocal fry, with the huge emotional punch of ‘Glen Street’, and it’s like a scream of pain for a past life in that Sydney suburb of Belrose.

But the song ‘Life Moves On Without Us’ reflects that movement of time. The song has huge machine gun fire drums that create a powerful, raw, and surging force you can feel from the first few notes. Then, ‘Act II’ featuring vocals from Jack Bergin (Void Of Vision) brings a rough and thunderous introduction to the next phase of the album. It battles with the themes of respect that turn to envy: “In the shadow of you/ I’m desperate to be like you” with the jarring vocal harmonies expressing the unstable emotions of antipathy and acrimony.

The centrepiece of the album is the song ‘Withered’. It is the song that brings together the juxtaposed themes of light and darkness. It is a wrenching song that will burn into your ears and brain through its distorted guitar riffs and breakdowns. The song is heavy and emotional, about self-worth and loss, as expressed in the anguished refrains of “eight years of my life/ dedicated/ desolated” chasing the light only to find darkness. This refrain is explored in ‘Only Sky’ with the feelings of loneliness and the fear of missing out. Its shoegaze melodic start breaks down into the heavy, as the fear of having “missed my chance already” permeates the sonic soundscape.

After all this emotional turmoil, the song ‘Tongue Tied’ featuring vocals from Mikaila Delgado (Yours Truly) is a straight rock song with lighter acoustic guitars, and it is a tender love song that builds to a lovely rock crescendo. It is a reprieve before the storm breaks with ‘Showed Me Who I Am’. It’s a monster of a track with huge drum blasts and scream singing dominating the emotional sonic soundscape.

Bloom has delivered an album that exposes the darkness and disinfects it in ‘The Light We Chase’