A Hope For Home - Realis (2010)

Facedown Records, March 30, 2010

Tracklist

1. Nightfall
2. The Overman
3. Withering Branches
4. The Machine Stops
5. No Light
6. Post Tenebras Lux
7. First Light of Dawn
8. The Crippling Fear
9. The Warmth of the Heavens
10. Seasons
11. Ascension
12. After

This entry is one in a series of ten-year retrospectives on my favorite albums from the year 2010. A Hope For Home, an Oregon-based group, started out their career as a post-hardcore group and then transitioned to an abstract mix of sludge and post-metal. Realis was released under Facedown Records, a label that focuses on straightforward hardcore and metalcore, though sonically it diverges from that sound. Rather than following the template of the genre, A Hope for Home includes a lot of atmosphere and allows each song to progress at its own pace to a natural climax.  In 2011, the band would go further down the post-metal route with the seven-track In Abstraction, which has the theme of fire. 

Thematically, Realis has a strong emphasis on light and the absence of it, which is reflected in both the song titles and the album’s tonal shift from futility to hope. As the two-song introductory segue of "Nightfall" and "The Overman" would indicate, this is a project that is fully devoted to its strengths as a whole album - not a compilation of individual tracks. “Ascension” is the shining moment of the album with an expansive, magnificent instrumental section that lets the music convey emotion on its own. The bleak dreamscape of "No Light" is another song that stands out. The shift towards hope begins with the seventh track "First Light of Dawn", and the concepts are so well organized that Realis could easily be two separate EPs titled "Night" and "Dawn". Guitarist Tanner Morita has stated that this album marked the point where "we truly stopped writing music for others and began writing music for ourselves - raw, noisy, and imperfect as it may be."

A Hope For Home have created a dynamic masterpiece with this album. While "No Light" and "Ascension" are the songs that stand out the most to me, the album and the spiritual concepts behind it work marvelously as a whole.  For those reasons, Realis earns a near-perfect score of 9.5/10.  If you're a fan of post metal or post hardcore, make sure you don't miss one.