Taking all the best parts of the band’s alt-folk fusion, The Amazing Devil’s sophomore album “The Horror and the Wild” is contemporary in its references yet timeless in its language, giving the impression that each track might be a siren's call to a wild you may never escape. The cohesive artistic direction can be traced back to the band’s founders, Joey Batey and Madeleine Hyland. They design overwhelming walls of sound with synth, strings and crescendoing vocals that never falter into a discordant mess.
You can’t help but be caught up in the adrenaline of the drums and Hyland’s desperate ravings on “That Unwanted Animal.” Her harsh diction and bitter wordplay leave the lines...
“you follow philosophies but me, I laugh, I choke. ‘Well hello, my hollow Holofernes’ I wink but you don’t get the joke”
circling like the arms of a hurricane, with awe-inspiring destruction of the relationship that the listener has been made a voyeur of. And yet, on the other end of the album’s spectrum is “Wild Blue Yonder,” which also tells of us a failed love but instead of violence we’re given silly similes like
“come and rip off my socks like you’re blasting the locks off of a bank vault.”
Batey and Hyland never linger on a single tone or sentiment too long, letting the album speak as unique tracks that come together to be worth well more than the sum of their parts.
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