Album Review: Beau Navire - Lumens

Album Rating: B+

Beau Navire is as Beau Navire does.  For the past two years the band has been making waves within the emotional hardcore community with their distinctly abbrasive delivery and old-school sound.  Last year's Hours was the band's crowning achievement up until that point.  Amidst some impressive early work and a great debut, Hours still stood tall.  Hearkening back to acts such as Saetia and Orchid, it was a brilliantly crafted record in a sea of passable and derivative works.  A mere year later, Beau Navire has appeared to show the world that it isn't a band that rests on its laurels.

Lumens retains the same choatic and fierce sound that fans have come to love.  It still sounds like a mesh of 90's screamo mixed with Ampere, but that really isn't a bad thing.  However, things this time around are startlingly heavier.  A caustic air surrounds the album's 10 songs, sounding much more painfully cathartic than ever.  It is with this that the album finds its own identity.  Rather than be a clone of the band's previous work, the album stands tall as an original and fresh batch of tunes with a sound all their own.

Beau Navire's third outing is about as spectacular as screamo gets these days.  Full of anger, saddness, and beauty, Lumens is a wonderful experience.  A lot of the atmosphere has been ported over from Hours, which is excellent considering how woefully dramatic songs like "Amongst Ashes" and "Our Illumination" are.  On the other hand, the opener "Prisims" is easliy one of the hardest hitting songs the band has created.  With a deep, ominous sound to open things up, the song blazes through with almost gleeful destruction as it nears a memorable climax.

Lumens continues Beau Navire's journey to be one of emo's most promising acts.  Wonderful record after wonderful record has proven the band's skill and musical understanding, and Lumens does absolutely nothing to change that fact.

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Track List:

1. Prisms
2. Communiqué
3. Dead End, Start Over
4. Podebrady
5. Disgust & Fate
6. Amongst Ashes
7. One So Illusive
8. Paper Lanterns
9. Epistolary
10. Our Illumination