‘Fight the good fight’ with our christian metalcore friends. And welcome to the first review from me, I will endeavour to channel Ross@’s vehemence and wordy over-the-top-ness.
So SB are a metal band with jesus-fish overtones. Their last effort on Victory was 2005’s ‘Immersed’,a preachy tribute to Pantera, and one year later not much has changed. In fact the shiny cymballed production of their last record has been replaced with a much dirtier, louder, no-nonsense sound. And I think they’re a great deal angrier than they were too.
‘Candice’ starts with the ubiqitous quote from a movie before exploding into a jagged array of riffs and thundering bass, peppered with an overtuned snare drum. Imagine Meshuggah but without the controlled clinical approach and some serious downtuning and you’re nearly there. Vocalist CJ is even more pissed off than last year and his screaming and sometimes random
caterwauling is undoubtedly compelling. The same problem remains though; he can’t sing the melodic parts. However this isn’t so bad since the melodic passages are much fewer and far between than they were on ‘Immersed’. Speed, anger and riffage is the name of the game here and it suits them more than the sub-par Pantera impression of their previous work. The few melodic sections do ruin things somewhat but they’re quickly followed-up by more madcap metal breakdowns. SB’s song structure on first listen does seem to be riff / breakdown / different riff / different breakdown, and it can be hard to follow, but persevere and there’s some very clever structuring going on there. ‘Vile’ is a great example of this, with double-time blastbeats overlapped by CJ’s screams and twin guitar noodling. Choruses aren’t exactly forthcoming.
The problem I have is they’re not as good as the sum of their influences, and I’d rather listen to Unearth or As I Lay Dying. If you like your metal then it’s a worthy purchase, but I don’t see this release furthering their fanbase much. I liked ‘Immersed’ a little better because of it’s cleaner sound and bass-heavy production. This just doesn’t thunder as much, and is one for the proper metal crowd only.
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Victory Records
Si