Fight the Silence

In some ways I feel that in playing metalcore, this band is disadvantaged and has to work harder if they want to produce quality music. They seemed to live up to this standard somewhat well in their previous LPs, delivering creative riffs, half-decent cleans and mildly appropriate breakdowns. They have always been obsessed with saturating their songs with palm-muted chugging, but at least it had some conrast and originality. But it's as if they stripped down all their previous work to a bare minimum, mixed it a bit and strived to create the least creative core album ever. Everything from their riffs, song structure, vocals, lyrics, even their album art.

You can count the number of distinctive riffs this album has on one hand, and they are all several seconds of basic sweeping that attempt to fool the listener into thinking that the ridiculously uncreative and bland chorus that always ensues is some kind of sanguine, artistic contrast to the 'brootal core' that you'll be hearing again in 20 seconds. Every now and again, they'll layer the chugging with some basic, underwhelming riffs so that the listerner won't mistake the album for 40 minutes of machine gun fire.

The vocalist has demonstrated his prowess previously, delivering some decent highs and growls, but in this album he sticks exclusively to mids, (not to mention to the strenuous cleans). Coupling this with song structures similar to that of dubstep (crappy intro leading up to a breakdown, two or three minutes trting to establish a melody, then finishing the song with a randomly selected part of the melody), you're in for a pretty tiresome listening.

The vocalist has said previously that if a band is not obviously Christian, then they're not at all. Using this criteria, I have no idea how this could be classified as a Christian album. They've boldly proclaimed their devotion to Christ in basically every other release, yet on this, Christianity is not even mentioned. Just vague protests against "the system." The only context comes from their music video for the title track, where information exposing human trafficking is given. While this is commendable, the lyrics are easily construed as whiney complaints about society without context.

If, for some reason, you want to listen to metalcore, do not, under any circumstances touch this album.