Sunday, June 29, 2008

Grab The Wheel And Make This Life Yours

August Burns Red is a Christian Metalcore band out of Pennsylvania who play a metal akin to As I Lay Dying, Misery Signals and Between The Buried And Me. They are sickeningly brutal while retaining a strong sense of melody.

It boggles me that metalcore often gets shunned by the metal community when in fact metalcore essentially blends the extreme styles of metal (death, black and thrash) with the aggression of hardcore as well as the melodic sensibilities of traditional heavy metal. It doesn't make any sense.

Anywho on with my review. It had been a while since I spun my August Burns Red albums and I had forgotten how brutal and heavy they were. At times they broke into death metal and black metal within the same song.

"Thrill Seeker" the bands full length debut is a slab of brutal melodies, heavy yet moving. The album begins with "Your Little Suburbia Is In Ruins" which is blistering assault, fast and disturbing with moments of head-banging crunch.

"The Reflective Property" takes the speed and adds more melody while "Consumer" blasts brutality around the melodic parts.

"Too Late For Roses" is moving yet dark with a sickly heavy outro. "Barbarians" speeds things up again retaining a strong melodic sense and "A Wish Full Of Dreams" adds to that with some crushing riffs.

"Endorphins" has a bleaker sound staying heavy and using gang chorus's. "Speech Impediment" leans more on the hook and is a moving heavy piece. The last few songs really bring home this album and are the stand outs in my opinion.

"A Shot Below The Belt" is dark and heavy song with some classic metal riffing and some good chunk and melodies. "Eve Of The End" is a heavy instrumental with hooky riffs and an eerie groove.

My favourite song, however, is the album closer "The Seventh Trumpet". This is an epic track beginning slower and rhythmic whose dark atmospheric riffing builds without variant into a cacophony of bleakly uplifting melody. A triumphant tune.

I have a lot of albums and there are times when I'll let gems such as these guys fly under my radar for a while only to be surprised as I cycle through my collection. Up next is August Burns Red sophomore release " Messengers".

Stay tuned!

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home