Sporadic Rock Album
'Earthkeeper' by pinkshift
Pinkshift have been on my radar for ca. 2 years now, having first seen them at a Festival in '23. Probably would have missed their show if a friend hadn't recommended them and man, what a show, what a band!
They offer a very cool and unique blend of hardcore, metal and emo influences and with that the kind of rage and energy you would imagine, but theirs is a rage born from a very distinct love of life and humanity that's very relatable to me. It's hard to put into words, but if you've seen them you'll know what I'm talking about.
This brings me to how their second studio album 'Earthkeeper' managed to land so well with me this year. There's only really two ways you you can react to the state of this world if you're going through it with open eyes and an open heart. You might despair and fall over from the sheer volume of awful shit or you might channel all that emotion into a constructive anger.
Having found myself more often than not on the first side of that dichotomy, this record has been the perfect antidote that got me through much of the year. I genuinely think 'Earthkeeper' is the perfect distillation of our current time, at least from my position in an evermore right-shifting and generally awful world. I'll share an anecdote from this evening that's somewhat unrelated but really speaks to the state of mind that's so easy to despair at;
When I was walking home from the grocery store I noticed how little stars you could see despite me living in a very small town. What hit me then was that what I thought were the three stars in a straight line that formed the belt of the Orion constellation had no arms and legs around it and that's when it hit me: Those weren't stars but satelites that flickered subtly when looking at them closely. Infact the longer I stood there and looked, nearly all of what little stars you could see were similarly artificial. It's somewhat of an inconsequencial anecdote, but that visceral feeling of something being deeply wrong here really hasn't let me go.
To get back to pinkshift, aside from the emotional impact their latest record had on me, it's also musically quite interesting in the sense that they sound very familiar in many aspects but that specific blend is somewhat hard to nail down as one specific genre description. You get a lot of punk, especially in their lyricism and overall presentation, however the wider production and instrumentation is both a lot bigger and more slick and concise in other places.
A lot of the guitar work feels inspired by various different directions that came out of hardcore music in the late 90's and aughts. The bigger coruses clearly remind of classics from the pop-punk branch of Emo while many of the verses and weirder parts in between moreso give meldodic-/post-hardcore. Notably they also play in way slower tempo than what some of those hardcore inspirations would suggest.
Fav Song: Anita Ride
Enjoy!
