Overcome

Overcome is a pretty lame album. Largely bland instrumentation breeding listless compositions lacking in melodicism or anything really worth a damn. Any remaining edges The Fall of Ideals had – which were but a scant few – are rounded to a point where Overcome becomes spherical in its look. Effectively, most every song on here sounds the same. So, if you don’t like what “Before the Damned” and “Two Weeks” are selling, Overcome ends up dead on arrival. Even when given a generous appraisal, all that can be said is that every song on here vies so hard for radio play that you can see it all the way from Pluto without a telescope. Like, it’s not incompetently put together or anything. Phil isn’t putting nearly as much into the screams as he had in the prior two albums, but... at least he’s not just lazily barking into the mic like he had in the debut? The clean vocals aren’t as strong as before, but it at least – yeah, I think you know where this is going.

The main problem with this album is that it always seems like it’s building up to something really good. Like, you’re listening to riffs that just barely pass a quality control test serving as the framework for this rocking kinda metalcore track, you’re constantly expecting somebody to let it rip and yet... nothing. The riffs travel along this semi-serviceable groove. Phil provides the vocals necessary to make a non-instrumental song work, adding to the groove with his own vocal melody. The percussion provides the groove with some kicks to stop it from being a 111% monotonous wall of sound. The chorus morphs the riff either into a higher register or slows it down. The percussion follows this change adequately enough, trying to give this grandiose sound to try and make the chorus pop. It monotonously chugs on through as if it’s trying to blend in with the verse riffs, only showing it’s the chorus by reprisal at certain junctures in the song. It eventually ends, not with a bang or even a whimper. No, it just ends. Another song down. Hope this one ends up on the radio.

Overcome is an album that just happens. Some guitars are played, some harsh screamy vocals and clean vocals are vocalized, some drums give beats to these things, a ripper of a solo is played after the second chorus – like, imagine taking a Racer X song and just taking the life out of everything but Paul Gilbert’s solos. It’s a pretty rough (and generous) approximation of every song on here. In particular is “Chiron” – man, what a frustrating song this is. Given a surface-level appraisal, it sounds like something left on the cutting room floor when putting The Fall of Ideals together. There appears to be a little more oomph. Namely, the riffs having a little more pep to them. But talk about squeezing the life out of a song... just apply some sterile production, round off any sort of edge in the riffs and vocals, and voila! An absolute disappointment within a disappointment of an album that signalled the end of this band being interesting as they continued down a path of background noise full of nothing riffs, nothing grooves and wasted Racer X solos.