Five tracks of typical melodic Swedish death metalcore separated only by the fact that the riffs are better than average and the vocals are pretty over the top. The recording is definitely too muddy to really do the songs complete justice, but you get the idea of what's going on, and despite being entirely unoriginal I have to give them credit for writing far more energetic and memorable riffs than the majority of these bands. The style is full of straightforward guitar harmonies and powerful dual guitar runs with a few chunkier breakdowns, tactful tremolo picking, and a few breaks of singing to break up all the intense screaming or gang backup shouts. If they could brighten up the sound quality to add some clarity to the instrumentation without losing any of the low-end density they'd be in a good position, because I honestly really like a lot of these riffs a ton, and they piece everything together rather effectively as far as songwriting is concerned. True, the songs can tend to sound similar to one another at times, and that needs to be ironed out, but as a whole these kids have a better idea of how this shit ought to be done, so that's cool. "Eyes of Hope" opens with more of a thrashy harmony that has a weird sense of dissonance to it, later cranking out some of the more mosh worthy breakdowns; "Icarus Decimated" keeps the energy level rather high; and "Apostate" hits nearly eight minutes and drops some killer dual guitar interaction and lots of tempo changes as well as some interesting chord phrasings and an amazing clean passage that shockingly all works to make the track rather effective. The layout here's a strange one, with mostly black and white designs and a lot of layered text/imagery that keeps things rather abstract, definitely out of the ordinary. It looks good for the most part, however. As far as the lyrics go it's personal stuff with ample mentions of regret and hardship and metaphors of the "bleeding cloud" variety, if you know what I mean. Not really my thing, but hey, that's life. The music is good, though. I hate to give it a 6 rather than a 7/10, but it is unoriginal, and it does need work, there's no real way to argue against that. The promising bits are damn strong, and the clean run at the end of "Apostate" is seriously fucking gorgeous, so I have high hopes for this band. If they push the writing a little harder and try to expand their horizons a little bit with the dynamic shifts and working more singing vocals in they could do some major damage. I'll be looking out for that.
[Recorse]
Running time - 27:27, Tracks: 5
[Notable tracks: Leaving Three Years Behind, Apostate]
Recorse Records - http://www.recorserecords.com
