Love and Other Disasters

Sonic Syndicate reached their peak on this album, combining a great mixture of fantastic rhythms and your typical vocal style, one a harsher style than the other. In general, this album is remarkable, in that in would normally appeal to a younger, more scene-ish audience, with songs like Jack of Diamonds acting much like a song that would be set to get a friend into the scene, or band for that matter. What this record lacks in complexity, it more than makes up for it with how much of a sing-a-long style album this is, and honestly, you'd be a fool to not realise how difficult it would be to do that in this genre.

They appear to have well and truly taken a serious musical learning curve after their previous release, as they've clearly taken on a much more listener friendly approach to recordings. Blue Eyed Fiend and Callous appear to have some serious roots throughout this album, with them somehow releasing My Escape as a ballad on this album, which provided a nice change in musical direction from everything else on it.

The best song off this album are by a mile or two is Jack of Diamonds, merely due to how catchy it is, which possibly isn't the best attribute for a song in this genre to possess, but hey, we're all allowed a guilty pleasure aren't we? But this isn't so much of a guilty pleasure, this release is pure and simply the best they've done, the best in the genre for that year, and on par with some of the better releases of the last decade.
Love it or hate, Sonic Syndicate were encaptured in this release alone and should've released this album before Eden Fire as they'd of been a much much much bigger band than what they were prior to Richard and Roland leaving.