Atheist’s Cornea arrives after the longest break between Envy albums, but that’s immaterial—the Japanese post-hardcore titans have reached a point of being so embedded within their genre that they can disappear without really going away. Their splits with Thursday and Jesu are crucial documents of post-hardcore diplomacy as is their working relationship with Mogwai, reaching out towards post-rock, metal, and emo. Bands that incorporate some combination of those elements—Deafheaven, Touché Amoré, Mono, to name a few—sing their praises. They may have singlehandedly legitimized screamo. All of which sets up quite nicely for Atheist’s Cornea: it can be framed as a "triumphant return" and also an opportunity to reappraise their overlooked past work without having to go through the trouble of reissuing it. But after five years that reiterated how much Envy has influenced other bands, for 40 minutes, Atheist’s Cornea plays out a complete role reversal.
"Blue Moonlight" starts with a 20-second salutation of wayward, delayed notes that gets decimated when the band enters with a typical, consumptive roar. This move doesn’t get repeated all that much throughout Atheist’s Cornea, though it’s a proper introduction in promising, "this is a post-hardcore record that will have pretty moments." Its means of making good on that promise go as expected. "Blue Moonlight" bursts apart in opposite directions much like Deafheaven’s “Dream House", heat-seeking guitars skyrocketing towards the sun and drums keeping the rhythm of falling down a jagged mountainside. Meanwhile, the twin guitars of "Ignorant Rain at the End of the World" swordfight like early Thursday, swift clashes of sharp, clanging metal. Closer "Your Heart and My Hand" damn near namechecks an Explosions in the Sky song with its title alone, to say nothing of the tremolo-picked clean leads and drum crescendos and everything else that causes "cinematic!" and "epic!" to be dug out of critical wordbanks like a reflexive, glassy-eyed dig into a bag of popcorn.
Fortunately, the specific textures of Tetsuya Fukagawa’s vocals aren’t as easy to imitate as Envy’s pedalboard setup. Compared to most of his peers, Fukagawa has a squat, muscular, and ugly tone rather than something shrieking or abrasive. Especially as the band becomes more slickly produced, Envy songs are immiscible mixtures where the vocals always rise to the top. It can be difficult for non-aficionados to distinguish what makes for a good vocalist in this realm, but Fukagawa clearly has range. Not in the multi-octave operatic sense—rather, he has a number of distinct modes of expression. Whether he’s dramatically muttering spoken word, letting out a blowtorch-intense, burnt-black scream, or a surprising sing-song cadence in "Footsteps in the Distance", Atheist's Cornea maintains an urgency that’s palpable even for those who don’t speak Fukagawa’s native language.
Still, this is a tenuous foothold as the instrumentals of Atheist’s Cornea go through every "emotional" post-hardcore motion. They may boast more technical precision and higher production values than most—the gleaming open chord strums on "Footsteps in the Distance" sound like straight-up alt-rock triumph rather than some distorted approximation of it. Likewise, the tinkling Rhodes solo in the middle of "Shining Finger" is a legitimately new touch and there’s unassailable beauty in the sighing string arrangements of "Ticking Time and String" (naturally) and the cymbal washes of "An Insignificant Poem". It’s not Envy’s fault these effective means of establishing contrast are basically public domain tropes in post-hardcore. But Envy established their reputation of being one step ahead rather than in lockstep with their peers...it is their fault for assuming the risk of doing these things in 2015. There’s almost no way Envy intended to namecheck their progeny in such an orderly manner. But it does get to the troubling contextual effect of hearing them in 2015 rather than echoed in other’s work: Envy just sound like an Envy-influenced band now.
