Sunrise "Traces to Nowhere" CD
[Lifeforce]
Here's a solid full-length of brutal metalcore from this longstanding vegan straightedge act out of Poland. Damn near every song hovers right around three minutes and they deliver a consistent pounding of chunky breakdowns, burly vocals, a few light hints at melody, and plenty of thrashy rhythms rooted in the 90's European metalcore scene that spawned them. What makes this more effective than a lot of other bands of this nature is that the songs tend to remain streamlined and focused around a few riffs and tempo changes rather than jumping all over the place. They never get too fast or too slow, the songs don't drag on for too long, etc. There are some slight Swedish death metal influences happening, but rather than the tired contemporary sound these guys are drawing more from Entombed and the like with a faintly rocked out sense of groove, while "Escape Failure" even drops an unexpected Bolt Thrower-esque lead line. The title track tosses in a few swift hits of tremolo picking, but for the most part it's a really energetic piece that takes many influences from classic thrash metal given a modern facelift - a direction that prevails for the majority of the disc. "Beyond Sanity" has some of the strongest midpaced breaks in it ranks, leading into "Scream Bloody Murder", which opens up sounding like straight NYHC but ends up becoming the catchiest track herein with its thrash runs and vague sense of melody. "Smiling Bag" closes the disc with some of the most openly melodic elements and more creatively dissonant chord phrasings that add some texture to the composition and give the basslines a bit of added breathing room, which could be an interesting approach for the band to explore further. The production is pretty damn good, too. The guitar tone is thick and well controlled to work perfectly with this style of rhythm playing, the bass sounds huge and stands out to plug away alongside the guitars, the vocals are pretty hefty and blend in well with the core of the instruments, and the drums are also fairly crisp and hold things down with straightforward patterns and fills. The layout looks nice and consistent with fiery colors and landscape imagery that almost has an ominous sort of apocalyptic feel going on. Lyrically a few songs sort of hint at socio-political issues, whereas most of the material covers personal hardships and whatnot: "I let myself think that things are black and white, Was led astray corrupted by my ego and pride, I let myself be fed on lies and be deceived, I was the stereotype I hated to believe..." Not bad. I like this. There's not a great deal of variety, so the songs all sound pretty similar to one another, but they cap it off at 30 minutes and go on their way, so that balances it out. I haven't heard that much from these guys in the past, but this is a strong effort that would lead me to believe that the band's got plenty of steam left, and may very well we be at their best to date. (7/10)
Running time - 30:29, Tracks: 9
[Notable tracks: Beyond Sanity, Scream Bloody Murder, Smiling Bag]
Lifeforce Records - http://www.lifeforcerecords.com

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