On 4/20 this past year, I was working on a joke article for Tuned Up called “Blaze It and Praise It: The Stoner-iest Christian(ish) Albums Ever Released.” While brainstorming in the staff Discord, one of the other writers mentioned that A Hope For Home’s last record was basically just a sludge metal record. I hadn’t heard it, so in the spirit of doing good research, I put it on.
In about ten minutes, I was scouring Discogs for a copy, yadda yadda yadda, and here we are.
In Abstraction isn’t just “basically a sludge metal record.” It’s a rich blend of sludge heaviness, post rock atmosphere, and post-hardcore energy that is still fresh.
According to my brief research, A Hope For Home was started by former guitarist Kyle Cooke in response to a cancer diagnosis. Despite the separation of his condition, he wanted to communicate a message of hope, hence the name. Cooke passed away before the first record was released, but the band pressed on in his memory. They signed with Facedown Records, a Christian-adjacent label primarily focused on hardcore, emo, and punk.
While A Hope For Home started with more of a post-hardcore sound befitting the label, a few albums in, they started implementing influences like ISIS and Cult of Luna. By In Abstraction, very little of their post-hardcore roots remained. The songs are long, slow, and heavy. Only two of the songs are shorter than six minutes, with three of them going past eight.
There are moments of plodding, glacial heaviness, like opener “Calm” (which is anything but) interspersed with sweeping, shapeshifting atmospherics like “Firewind” and “Tides.” Guitars shift from fiery distorted detuned riffs to reverb-drenched, aqueous ambient figures without losing a mite of their potency. Vocals range from punishing screams to a delicate emo-ready warble.
And I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a sucker for almost any kind of slow metal with a heavy-soft dynamic. But the way those sounds are arranged in the context of the full album is masterful. The first side of the record is more fiery, exploding out the gate with “Calm,” then the more-subdued-but-still-screamy “Out of Ruin, Misery.” The middle section of the record takes a step back, utilizing more clean vocals and post rock arrangements, with the heavy moments fewer and further between. The emotional “The House Where You Were Born” and delicate “Fire:Spread” (oddly listed as “Weaved” on streaming services) are reminiscent of post rock/emo fusion acts like the Appleseed Cast or Moving Mountains, spacey guitars and angular drums dancing around electric piano tracks.
But it all comes to a head in the epic, nearly ten-minute finale “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” It rises from the same post rock atmosphere of the two songs that precede it, landing very close to Japanese legends Mono, echo-soaked tremolo guitar taking the part of a violin. As the song builds, the screamed vocals make their first reappearance since the first side of the record and the band returns to the aggressive riffing of the first track. It then returns to the opening coda of the track with a dynamic power that matches the heaviest moments on the disc before letting a single chord resound for several minutes at the close.
If you know my tastes at all, you know that I’m an absolute sucker for this kind of stuff. It’s equal parts heavy and gorgeous without compromising on either element. They may have been introduced to me to make a joke, but In Abstraction is the real deal.
Plus, they shared my “Blaze it and Praise It” article with a sunglasses emoji, so you know they’ve got a sense of humor too.