Cleft are done. Wrong is their last album, a swan song full of maniacal riffs and brutal drumming. A gut punch, not a sucker punch. This album faces the doom of a band and gladly accepts it. Why cower when the end is in front of you?

You could argue that this album would reflect on the past five years and submerge into meditations; careful voyages through pithy observations about band life. That argument doesn’t work with Wrong. Cleft goes self-immolation, taking a good tour of four studios to craft this beast. No time for morose feelings, no weepy goodbyes. Fast, visceral and curt.

At least, that’s what you want to believe. Maybe it’s a brave face situation. Maybe it’s catharsis. Whatever it is, with Wrong, Cleft close the chapter, seal the book with the strongest wax and entomb it, Chernobyl style. Beneath that concrete sarcophagus, you can still hear the beating heart of their fiercest tracks. ‘Me, sugar’  pounds the walls, with arpeggios resonating while the drum builds up a racket. The song has a tender aggressiveness that pretty much is the sound of Cleft free flying to their hearts’ content.

‘Bees, Beads, Beas’ tumbles while ice skating uphill, only to land with the utmost grace on its thumbs. It’s a great trick of technical prowess to pretend that you are lost in a chaos of licks and syncopate rhythms and this made Cleft such a great band: the more you move away from the chaos, the more you realise it was well structured, like a Sierpinski gasket.

The closest you’ll get to introspection is with tracks like ‘Alan’ and ‘David’; meditative segues that act like frontiers between the raging moods of Cleft‘s hard, long goodbye. Speaking of goodbyes, ‘Dohmlette’ closes the album, fading slowly. Using a synth as a guide into the last hurrah, ‘Dohmlette’ does resist for a few moments but knows it’s inevitable.

All ends. Wrong is a reminder of this. Thank for these five years, Cleft, you were one of the good ones.

Random thoughts: 

-Contrary to what Beardy McSexy said in his review of Bosh, I fully loved that love that album. And Wrong is even better.

–Whale Bone was one of our Scooby Doo Ghosts of 2012.

-Has it really been five years? You could think of this as a short period of time, but so much has happened… time is weird. Thank you, Cleft. 

Words: Sam J. Valdés López

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