Amber Run - For A Moment, I Was Lost

Rating:

An eye-opening glimpse at the glorious peaks that can come from despair.

It takes a lot to bounce back when times get dark. For Amber Run, the time around and after the release of debut album ‘5AM’ was one packed with self-doubt, personal setbacks and a professional crossroads that many bands simply wouldn’t come back from. With the aptly titled ‘For A Moment, I Was Lost’ the band don’t just come back, but pour that darkness into a refreshing new chapter that signals the band they look destined to become.

A dense and panoramic record, there’s a new found sense that Amber Run aren’t fucking around. Take ‘No Answers’, a gripping and unravelling epic that takes murmuring synths and twists them into an out of control twister that snarls and menaces with a potent urgency. Straddling that line between vulnerability and intense frustration, it reaches boiling point with the cutting slides of ‘Island’, the drastic shadows of ‘Perfect’ and the simmering love-lorn rage of ‘Darkbloom’. For every explosive moment, however, is one of crippling fragility - one that can’t be ignored with the stripped back ‘Haze’ spine-chilling in its delivery while ‘Wastelands’ takes stadium-sized choruses and heralds them with an unrelenting honesty that sounds like a cleansing moment of reality in a sea of bleakness.

‘For A Moment, I Was Lost’ is the sound of a band hitting their heads on rock-bottom and attempting to work out the realities of the world around them while bouncing back up. What it shows for Amber Run, is that it may have taken their darkest moments to distinguish the band they were meant to be, and for that, it’s an eye-opening glimpse at the glorious peaks that can come from despair. Jamie Muir