Album Review: The Blackest Beautiful by Letlive

For a long time after I first heard it, I wanted to write a review for Letlive’s Fake History. I’m not sure why I never did, but it probably had something to do with the apologist tone that I would have inevitably taken. I love Fake History, even at one point giving it a classic rating. But whenever I would think about how to start a review, I would mostly try to come up with defensive explanations.

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L. A. -based hardcore unit Letlive broke through in a big way with their 2010 album Fake History, finally capturing some of the bone-breaking energy of their live show in a way that translated to album as well as developing their arrangement skills with atypical song structures and inventive expansion of the sometimes formulaic post-hardcore sound.

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The biggest challenge LA punks Letlive face with their fourth album is creating something that matches the awesome, intense power of their acclaimed live shows. Their third, 2010’s ‘Fake History’, managed it in patches with tracks ‘The Sick, Sick, 6.8 Billion’ and ‘Renegade 86’, but ultimately tired later on. Now they’ve addressed their problems, and ‘The Blackest Beautiful’ is a strong, focused record from beginning to end.

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The Los Angeles quartet Letlive made a big splash in the post-hardcore scene with their third album, Fake History. This fourth full-length release should take them to a wider audience. The scream-laden mix of riffs, raps and rapid-fire drumming ought to appeal to fans of At the Drive-In and the Deftones, but Letlive have now also added the type of pop choruses that made Linkin Park global superstars.

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The human condition is imperfect – take joy in its incongruities and complexities, relish its faults and, most vitally, live in the knowledge that very little of what you do will fulfil the ideals that your earliest dreams recklessly pieced together. The Blackest Beautiful is every blemish that you choose to show, and not cover up, the closet built of skeletons that stands plainly in the corner of your bedroom, the crosshatch of scars that lie just below your watchline… The Blackest Beautiful, letlive. 's third studio album, is a driven and masterfully conceived example of grown-up hedonism; a record that knows its own worth, but couldn't give a single fuck if anyone else believes it.

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What a world we live in, eh? Modern society, gizmos and gadgets, the world shrinking power of the internet - everything seems geared up for transience: instagram photos don’t end up in albums, tumblr posts rarely make it into hard copy diaries and lives are lived vicariously through the microblogs of others. In the culture of our music too, things have changed. There has been an inexorable shift towards a system which lauds whatever the given flavour of the month is before cutting them loose when something more apt to impress your friends with on multitudinous social networks rolls around.

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