This is the third album from French sludge metal band Love Sex Machine.
When the promo blurb states that this is for fans of Meshuggah, Intronaut, Amenra, LLNN, Sumac, and Herod, you know it’s gonna be a heavy one. And it is. Trve is 36 minutes of heaviness wrapped in an expressive outer coating.
This sort of post-metal sludge is easy to do poorly and come across as a generic rip off of bands like Eyehategod or Iron Monkey. Thankfully, Love Sex Machine do not fall into the pitfalls that this style regularly offers up. Although Trve is built from many of the same building blocks as those two influential bands, it also expands wider than this, and burns brightly with an intense dynamic energy that belongs to itself; Love Sex Machine exist in their own right as their own malevolent entity. In this way they remind me of the mighty LLNN, a band that have similarly taken the core tenets of the style and made them their own.
Trve is relentless and punishing, delivering pulsing groove and abrasive riffs that are murderously compelling. The songs are powered by the sort of distorted malice that’s infectious. Eschewing empty rage for the sake of it, the music instead explodes forth with guitar-based heaviness that’s surprisingly nuanced in its emotive depth; it might flatten you to a bloody paste, but it will make you feel something while it does so beyond simple pain and hatred.
Around the core nastiness of sludge metal’s ugly brutality we get a tight musical wrecking ball that showcases exactly what Love Sex Machine are capable of. Trve is constructed around concise songwriting that contains an arsenal of hooks. The band’s assault is remarkably multifaceted, incorporating melody, synths, and blackened elements at key points, as well as other creative ideas. Trve may be a mountain of crushing sludge heaviness, but like a mountain, it has many ways to kill you.
Love Sex Machine have produced an enjoyable slab of textured heaviness. Resplendent in spectral auras that drip with the warm blood of its enemies, Trve is both sophisticated and savage.
Very highly recommended.
Wonderbox Metal 