Overcome

Do you folks like auto tune? Blatantly obvious auto tune? No? Well, then go ahead and give this album a skip if you haven't heard it already and go put on The Fall of Ideals instead. Overcome is like the mass marketed pop washed version of The Fall of Ideals, which is telling when taking into consideration that The Fall of Ideals was already riding the rails of one metal's most commercial forms.

This may be a bit of a disingenuous description though, because The Fall of Ideals had some fast thrashy riffs, this has slower riffs all the way through and a softer guitar tone to boot. The Fall of Ideals has a couple tracks with scant traces of clean vocals, Overcome has tracks made almost solely of cleans topped with lousy auto tune. Overcome at least retained the double pedal though, if in more limited quantities. The album encapsulates all of the elements of The Fall of Ideals but pop washed, all except the very cornerstone of metalcore music. Where the hell are the breakdowns? They're not there, I can't decide if this is good or bad though, on the upside it'd give these tracks a much needed punch near the ends, on the other hand though, I don't want to hear those dumb clean vocals performed over a breakdown ala third wave metalcore style, because I've already heard Attack! Attack!, Asking Alexandria and the rest of their "scene kid" ilk and it was a traumatizing experience the first time around, and with how pop washed this album is, that's the exact kind of garbage maneuver I'd expect Phil to pull if their were breakdowns here.

The fact is though, with the exception of the radio single Six, no one was listening to All That Remains prior work to sing along with a badly auto tuned singer with a mediocre vocal range. Hell, the band put out two straight albums where singing along in any capacity would have been quite a feat prior to this. People were listening to All That Remains because it was hard hitting melodic death metal band with just enough hardcore influence to transition almost seemlessly into a hard hitting melodic metalcore band over the course of three albums.

Now, to be fair, I used to be a fan of this album, the melodic edges on the guitar are quite nice, but its a bit absurd to hear songs that were clearly intended to be hard hitters like say Two Weeks, or really any of these songs and then be greeted with overly long melodic leads as the intro for basically every single track followed by the world's worst Adam Levine impersonation on the chorus and a squeaky clean production job with sterile guitar tones to boot.