Review: With Resistance/Twenty Inch Burial “Split” CD

With Resistance kicks off this short split disc with three tracks. Opener "Yo Larry's Wearing a Throwback!" is a bit of a misleading opener though, its brief 1:13 running time tossing around shitloads of rather generic chaotic metalcore riffing with lots of irritating discordance, tons of frantic screaming, and a few chunkier chords. "...No Gets It.", however, follows with more of the style that I found quite promising on their last record: A blend of heavy emo, lots of layered guitar melodies, quick changeups between semi technical riffs, smooth clean passages, and a few spurts of great singing vocals (which should be used more often). "I Like the Updated Version a Little Better..." closes and combines all of these approaches into one longer track that hits right around four minutes. It still leans too far towards frenzied and typical metalcore for me, but the balance of melody does help. And the sound quality is better this time out, which is awesome. The mix is nice and clear, the guitar tones are aptly hard hitting but still biting when they need to be, the screaming doesn't come to the fore, the percussion (while a little clicky) has a good snap to it, and the bass thickens up the core without being all that prominent. There's still room for work, but this sounds good for sure. Lyrically the tracks are somewhat brief and seem to basically deal with pessimistic personal turmoil, nothing that really hits me, but I've seen worse, so I'm not bothered either. Twenty Inch Burial (Portugal) follows with three more tracks of metalcore, similar in its blend of extreme melody and heaviness, though here the mix is more along the lines of heavy emo meets melodic Swedish death metal. They do use the whole singing/screaming thing, with lots of vocal layering, but the choruses tend to be upbeat melodic chords, while some of the verses are typical Swedish styled melodies and whatnot. The riffing is all rather simple and straightforward, never getting too caustic or anything of that nature, with the energetic (and awesome) "Material Expensive God" hitting some very tasteful dissonance. I enjoy their songwriting as it's fairly memorable for what it is (granted they need to tighten their performances somewhat), but their recording needs serious work, as it hinders their material greatly. The drums are rather thin and stand out in the mix, I'm not making out any bass, the vocals are a little flat, and the guitar tone is really lumped with midrange, so it's the loudest element but still lacks cohesive force. The end result is that I can sit through these songs and get a feel for what they do, but it's harder to enjoy the work due to the ineffective production. The lyrics are mostly personal, with one track lashing out at religion, so it's pretty standard stuff, but not bad, especially considering the language barrier. Visually things look pretty good, using a consistent color scheme and layered photographs/patterns with some faint images of cityscapes and architectural devices amongst the lyrics and such. This is a solid split, just a hair away from really hitting the mark. I'm torn on where I think With Resistance will head next, but I definitely still want to hear more from them, as they have a lot of potential, and there are some minor improvements displayed here. The same goes for Twenty Inch Burial, who writes good songs but simply suffers from problematic sound quality on this outing. Neither band is original, but if they keep pushing forward they'll do some damage. Not bad. I'll be watching out for more from each group.