AvaGrace – 'The Witching Hours' Album Review

Tracklist:

1. Misguided

2. Ghost

3. Close To The Edge

4. Still In Motion Pt2

5. Interlude

6. Failing Friends

7. The Witching Hours

8. Rain

9. Letters To Home

10. Consumer Consumed

AvaGrace are a band I’d never heard of before. And I always like that in a review, because you never know what they are going to sound like. And what they sound like on this, their debut album, is big. The production on this album is absolutely astounding and really helps sell the big Alt-Rock sound that the band produce.

Everything is beautifully polished – the musicianship on show is great, and they sound like one incredibly well-oiled machine, which isn’t really surprising as they appear to have been around since 2011 before dropping this debut album on the world. And the world should be grateful to receive it!

I’m impressed by the vocals – often on a debut album these can seem to be an afterthought (or at least have the least time / effort put into them), but Chris Horton’s powerful performance really does appear to be the glue that holds the rest of the band together. Whether it’s the beautiful melodic singing that is peppered throughout tracks like “Ghost”, or the powerful screaming that forms a vital part of several tracks, including “Failing Friends” and “Consumer Consumed”, the vocal performance really does add an extra positive layer to the album for me.

And there are some good songs here too, the aforementioned “Failing Friends” is one of my favourites, as well as the opening track “Misguided” and the funky, riff-heavy “Rain”, which is undoubtedly going on my “Songs of the year” playlist.

If I had to make any criticism, it would just be that as an album, it does sort of start to meld together. Don’t get me wrong, it has it’s positives, and there’s nothing here I would call bad, but the slight lack of variety means that I have quite often found myself just listening to three or four tracks at a time, rather than the whole album – although I know that’s the popular way to listen to music nowadays, so maybe I’m just old!

Regardless of my minor criticism, this is an exceedingly strong debut from a polished and very talented band. It definitely deserves your time and hopefully has paved the start of a great career for AvaGrace.