Tonight, Envy are awesome in the truest sense of the word. Their set isn’t exactly varied, but it is consistently soul-stirring: guitars start out icy before their inevitable, devastating crescendo; Dairoku Seki pounds his kit with fervour; while Tetsuya Fukagawa’s cathartic growl abrasively cuts through the maelstrom. Their hardcore/post-rock hybrid hews closer to the sublime than the beautiful, inspiring awe and demanding reverence.
At the heart of the set is recent single As Serenity Calls Your Name, written following the Tōhoku earthquake that devastated Japan’s Eastern seaboard earlier this year, and released to raise money for relief efforts. Over a crisp military beat and dense noise, Fukugawa delivers spoken vocals in lieu of his regular larynx-shredding, reserving his throat’s full force for the song’s final minutes. For anyone not fluent in Japanese, the words don’t sink in, but the emotional quotient does; an appraisal equally applicable to their performance as a whole.
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