Run with the Hunted – The Sieve and the Sand

It’s been ages since I last heard from or about Run with the Hunted. I guess the last time being their amazing show with Trial in Sofia. And few days ago when a friend mailed me a link to the digital version of their new record I was more than excited. See, Run with the Hunted is a band you have to experience live. Not that their records are poorly recorded or anything. Not at all, their energy on stage is too extreme to be captured by whatever studio or audio format… Once you see them live spinning the album or playing it on your iPod simply doesn’t suffice anymore. You want to be there, in front of the stage, blasted by loud sound, experiencing everything physically.

Having not experienced the band live for ages allowed The Sieve and the Sand to hit me with full force. And even if in the beginning the album deceivingly starts as your every chaotic and a bit more complex hardcore album it’s like a flower, it just needs time to fully blossom. The Sieve and the Sand is mostly mid paced and bouncier than extremely fast, but with sufficiently groovy and punchy moments. Sound-wise one doesn’t really have much to discuss as the people at The Earth Capital studio who have worked with both hardcore classics as Seven Generations and Mourningside AD and hyped bands as Touché Amore and Nails do know their thing. The best about the new Run with the Hunted are the lyrics. If this was released only as a book I would have been perfectly satisfied because the poetry that the lyrics of the album actually are is astonishing. A lot of radical ideas, transmitted figuratively and artistically meet with motives about self-loathing, loves forever lost, desperation, indifference to all human… You’d say nothing about you, but I’m sure you are simply about to get lost in all this. I really don’t like comparing artists but imagine the complexity of the metallic vegan bands writing meeting the intimate words of Carpathian’s Martin Kirby, and now add a lot more to it.

So when you’re about to play The Sieve and the Sand please kick everybody else out of the room, dim the lights and follow this album thoroughly. Read every single word from the lyrics, listen and experience. And I promise you, whenever you see it performed live you’d be changed. I’m looking for that day as well.