Helpless – Caged In Gold | Album Review

Five years after bludgeoning eardrums with their debut, Helpless have returned with a new lineup and a new album in the form of Caged In Gold.

With their first album Debt, they showed a love of blackened, death metal infused grind that was furious, extreme and to the point; with its followup, they’ve taken a similar tack but the talents of new members Sam Trenchard (drums) and Simon Walker (bass), who coalesced around original founding member Dan Couch (guitar/vocals), helped Couch expand on his vision for the band. 

Envisaged as being simply more of everything, that meant bringing in more riffs, more aggression but also dialling up the atmospheric and noise elements that, while present on Debt, were more in the background. With Caged In Gold, all these elements are indeed turned up, but they’re not overwhelming – at least, no more than is already by design with such a visceral, vitriolic album. Even the band name itself embodies their sound; defeat, despair, misery – hopelessness and raging at the dying of the light. Caged In Gold takes aim at materialism, consumerism and deceit; such as the way in which we are conditioned into believing we must always have more, getting trapped into an endless cycle of buying, getting some small gratification, then once more chasing that high by buying more and more. By the time we realise we’ve gone too far and that we’re trapped, it’s too late.

It’s a bleak, miserable outlook and one that musically sits well alongside other vicious noisemongers like Cult Leader, Trap Them or Mastiff. Similar to those bands and as they did with Debt, the band have more than enough short, sharp flurries of aural violence. The opening run of ‘Wraiths of Memory’, ‘The Empty Gesture’ and ‘Suppression’ is as unhinged as they come, stabbing guitars and furious roars in a cacophonous, unrelenting assault with drums that are a constant pounding barrage. That’s not to say Helpless are a one-trick pony, though. Those atmospheric elements are here and they dip into mires of sludge-laden groove such as on fifth track ‘Single File’. Its dirge-like opening is no less intense than the frenetic tracks that preceded it, and the desolate melodicism of the midsection is harrowing. 

Its follow up, ‘Time Worship’, delves into these sludgy waters in its opening bass notes but soon picks the pace back up with a swirling maelstrom of dissonance and fast groove. The beauty – if it can be called that – of an album like Caged In Gold is that, although musically it’s abrasive, confrontational and just plain nasty, it’s put together in such a way that’s not just compelling but cathartic, and even calls out for repeat listens to unpack everything the band manage to squeeze into under thirty minutes. Grimy, noisy and aggressive without ever wearing itself or the listener out, Helpless’ new album is a clinic in aggressive dissonance. As punishing as it is rewarding, Caged In Gold delivers on their creative vision in spades and will leave fans coming back for more.