The Heirs’ 2009 release Alchera was the band’s first outing into instrumental post rock/metal wilderness. It sat alongside the textures and gritty sounds of Swans, Nadja, and Neurosis, but also had clean melodic sounds of Red Sparowes. Amongst the tight cyclical drums and dissonant guitar sounds was a heaviness that expelled a certain force upon the listener. Hailing from a sparse instrumental scene in Australia, the band have admitted that they could stick out like a sore thumb around their local area, and although there are a few touring bands close-by that remain working friends, their music perhaps fits in with the greater following of listeners in Western Europe and East / West Coast USA.

Refreshingly on their sophomore album, Heirs have decided to mix things up. Fowl sees the core of the song-writing lay at the hands of guitarist Brent Stegeman instead of drummer Damian Coward, and he has included a particular concept for both the album and towards the creation of the record itself.

In his own words, Stegeman has stated that the album: “deals with the human processing of the ornery – the filth we feed upon to entertain us, to stave our hunger, to gratify our sexual desires, to escape our reality or simply to facilitate our survival.” It is particularly difficult subject to fully comprehend within the remit of an instrumental band. Also, Stegerman had much to do with the album artwork in which the central theme is depicted in the form of well… see above.

The band deliberately took a different approach to song-writing and recording, with every track being composed electronically and then transposed to guitar/bass/drums. Influenced by a lot of 80’s industrial and electronica, the band really wanted to get their teeth stuck into the heart of this production, but then release it in the form of their more accustomed and now hybrid live setup. The differences and improvements achieved in doing this seems minor and subtle. Of course more electronics are involved, but the band did such a great job at trying to create in essence a similar style on Alchera, that a lot of the album sounds very similar. Even within the compositions themselves they sound indifferent. Take the opening couple of tracks: ‘Dust’ and ‘Fowl’ are similar in construct to ‘Plague Asphyx’ and ‘Mockery’ from Alchera. Stegerman wanted to create “something rhythmically uglier and more threatening”, and he has with some of the tracks such as ‘Tyrant’ and ‘Men’, but on the whole and considering the changes in recording it just isn’t varied enough. Fowl is as good as Alchera and so if you enjoyed the dronescapes and coarse guitar textures, you are surely going to want to pick this up.