Your Favourite Enemies: Between Illness and Migration
Album release: "Between Illness and Migration" by Your Favourite Enemeies
Release date: 24 November 2014
Label: Graphite Records
Listen / more information: on official Your Favourite Enemies sit
Your Favorite Enemies are six chaotic individuals who collectively let go of their own self-depraved illusionary make-believes to surrender to the inner noises of moments they communally turned into songs, thus giving birth to a musical journey which has led them to their new album ‘Between Illness and Migration’. From reflections about the nature of letting go, redemption and mercifulness to rumination about faith, forgiveness, grace and absolution, the new album displays the bands most personal, honest and emotionally visceral work yet.
The band take influence from artists such as Sonic Youth, Fugazi, My Bloody Valentine and Mars Volta, and their unique and eclectic sound brings together fanatics from various musical backgrounds into a defining communion of high level noise, post-punk, psych, shoegaze and prog rock.
The new album has been mixed by the estimable John Agnello (Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., The Kills), and was recorded and produced in the band’s own studio (a former catholic church). It’s clear that working with such an influential figure has allowed the band to find the perfect balance between the stormy dynamic intensity to its furious tones and the fragile crisp of vulnerable sparks to the whispering density of its innermost form of musing confessions.
The 6 minute epic, ‘Empire Of Sorrows’, the lead track from ‘Between Illness and Migration’, combines brooding and dissonant spoken lyrics, (which are evocative of bands such as Listener, and mewithoutYou), with jarring low-fi instrumentation and refined post-rock vocals.
‘Empire Of Sorrows’ is a narrative storm, which Alex Foster (vocals) says, “could be seen as a spiritual epiphanic awakening or as an uplifting moment of consciousness, it could be the anthemic heartfelt scream of every underground megalopolitan outcast, the sincere whisper of anonymous passersby secretly longing to emancipate their spirit from the faceless waving crowd they've always been in."
The band’s last Canadian release rose to #2 on iTunes on the day of its release, and was also #6 top-selling artists in Canadian charts. This comes as no surprise when the band's previous releases have sold as many as 60,000 physical copies.
Kerrang! have previously called the band “Canada’s best kept secret”, and this album is evidence that you should be playing close attention to Your Favorite Enemies, as this won’t be the case for long.