The next thing you notice is how good the band sound. The clean, modern production values that No Sin Evades His Gaze use perfectly suit the drop-tuned, almost djent style that they play, which is less surprising, but it’s the vocals of frontman and ex-Ravenface singer James Denton that slam into you. No Sin Evades His Gaze have a sublime grasp of dynamic variance, capable of disgustingly heavy riffs and serene, almost beautiful clean sections, often within a few breaths of each other. Occasionally these clean sections do start to veer off into wishy-washy ambient sections, almost like The Contortionist but not quite as deliberate, and bordering on self-indulgent – however they do serve to make the heavy sections feel that much more impactful when they do rejoin.

It is unquestionably the skill of Denton and the guitarists that they are able to balance the heavy and melodic sections in such a way, and even when the rhythm section is throwing out a faster section or a Periphery-esque polyrhythmic beat, there is still usually some form of melody over the top holding it all together. Whether it’s a melodic vocal, lead guitar line, or electronic overtone, without the melodic leads there wouldn’t be much else to separate this band from those who delve far too deep into loads-of-breakdowns territory.

It is these melodies where the true strength of the album is. Songs like title track ‘Endless Disconnect’ and especially ‘Doomsday Generation’ are so catchy whilst retaining a core “metal” sound that it’s a genuine wonder that radio stations across the land haven’t picked them up. No Sin Evades His Gaze are clearly as influenced by Killswitch Engage as they are by Meshuggah, and it is this that lends so many of the songs (‘You Can’t Save Me’, ‘Heavy Days’ and ‘Feels A Lot Like Hell’ in particular) an accessibility whilst also still making them Metal As Fuck.

‘Endless Disconnect’ is a huge step up for a band that were already head and shoulders above many of their peers. More releases of the same quality as this will see them following their peers in Periphery, Tesseract and Devin Townsend right to cult fame.

ANDY LEDDINGTON

Manson is all over this record. Despite their main keyboard player having departed, the electronic craft over ‘Graveyard Shift’ is an almost unrecognisable amount more pronounced than on their debut album ‘Creatures’, and Chris Motionless’ vocals are, for the most part, much closer to The God Of Fuck’s than the Eighteen Visions-esque metalcore bellow he had before. Even where Manson isn’t being directly channeled, there’s still plenty of industrial comparisons to be made; most of ‘Queen For Queen’ could have been made by Celldweller, ditto for Blue Stahli on ‘Untouchable’. There’s a very definite Nightmare Before Christmas rip-off in ‘Not My Type: Dead As Fuck 2’ which is almost certainly on purpose.

As well and good as this is, the blend of quite generic industrial beats and synths and quite generic metalcore riffs and breakdowns is not the most exciting of combinations. ‘Graveyard Shift’ is also let down by having some extremely questionable lyrical content: “I’ma have my cake and fucking eat you too” in ‘Necessary Evil’ sounds kind of clever on surface level but as a statement is about as meaningless as any other collection of nine words randomly thrown together. If the whole Motionless In White thing doesn’t work out Chris could definitely have a decent career as an innuendo writer for Steel Panther, because based on this album alone he clearly knows a lot of different ways of saying he’s going to bang someone.

The culmination of the eyebrow-raising cringiness of the over-sexualised lyrics is ‘Not My Type: Dead As Fuck 2’ featuring such over-the-top gems as “She loves me ’cause I like to give head like a zombie” and “if she’s got a pulse then she’s not my type”. It’s possible that these are simply there so that parents will glance disapprovingly at their offspring’s door as they walk past while it’s blaring out of the speakers, but it is also just as possible that they were written in lieu of anything artistic or meaningful.

Even though the lyrics throughout are crap, and even though the musical composition is just two generic things generically smashed together, there is something enjoyable about ‘Graveyard Shift’. The stomp of the music is infectious beyond refusal, and if you can switch all bits of your brain off other than the bits that do “Shout” and “Breathe” then the lyrics cease to be so much of an issue and instead become something hilariously ironic to sing along to. Despite the many glaring flaws they have added Motionless In White have made an album that, at the very core of it, is a bouncy, head-banging romp through nearly 50 minutes of enjoyably basic electro-metalcore.

It’s a pretty sure bet that the songs on ‘Graveyard Shift’ will be pretty entertaining to experience live, especially at Motionless In White’s main stage performance at Download in less than a fortnight, but whether that’s because we’re laughing at them or with them will depend highly on how many of our neurons we’ve had to kill off with alcohol beforehand.

ANDY LEDDINGTON

Right from the very first second of opening track ‘Burdens’ you’re hit by a barrage of dirty, gritty, downtuned tech metal. But far from being the usual kind of cleanly-produced ‘djenty’ tech metal that has become the standard these days, ‘Cast The First Stone’ feels more like a tech album played by punk kids who have only just found out they make guitars with more than six strings. It’s a wonderfully refreshing change to what tech metal has become, and with all but one of the eleven tracks clocking in at three minutes or under, there’s none of the wishy-washy ambient sections; Ion Dissonance just plug in and go balls-to-the-wall.

The one slight downside to this album is that its intensity, which the album is angrily built around, can become hard to withstand after a while. After one listen you feel the need for a long cold bath just to cool off from the non-stop assault to your ears and even those who really enjoy having their head repeatedly caved in with an anvil will find themselves struggling with this one at points.

Nonetheless, you cannot fault Ion Dissonance for making an album that, whilst difficult and challenging, is still interesting. It’s technical in a “we can play our instruments so fast you’ll wonder how we do it” sort of way, and it’s this pace, combined with the cast-iron heaviness of it all, that makes this album both challenging, and remarkable in the same ways.

ANDY LEDDINGTON

Young Guns’ live show indicates they are much more interested in being a rock band than their latest material seems to suggest. However, despite their massive rhythm section tone and their obvious excitement to be playing around their main stomping ground, the over-inclusion of material from their latest album especially went some way to dampen their spark, especially when placed next to songs like ‘There Will Be Rain’ and ‘Bones’ which are just better in every way.

It was unmistakably clear who tonight’s crowd was here to see. And this was not a crowd who had just turned up to see the ending trifecta of Try Honesty, Fallen Leaves and Red Flag; from the very moment Billy Talent came onstage you could almost be forgiven for thinking we were watching a band returning triumphantly to their home town, such was the immediate and lasting reaction from everyone there.

Playing a selection of hits from a career now spanning over a decade and a half is always going to be special, but not only did Billy Talent bring some of their biggest and best hits of the last few albums, they treated us to some of the now almost forgotten hits like ‘River Below’, ‘Surrender’ and ‘Pins & Needles’ that only served to remind us how fantastic their back-catalogue really is.

Billy Talent’s display was nothing short of masterful. Their lighting display was fantastic, Ben Kowalewicz’s crowd banter was hilarious and friendly in a typically Canadian way and there was no faulting the band’s skill at playing their material despite being without their drummer Aaron Solowoniuk (who sadly was unable to be present on this tour due to his MS complications).

Outside we heard a man giving out flyers say that “rock music is dying”. If you really think rock music is dying you’re looking in the wrong place.

On the other hand, ‘Echoes’ isn’t particularly good. There’s a bit less of the pop-rock sensibilities than we heard on ‘Ones & Zeroes’, and though ‘Echoes’ does feel like a revisiting of their earlier material in terms of bringing the rock back, it feels more like that they’ve just put on a leather jacket rather than actually spent time listen to a lot of quality rock music for inspiration.

The production doesn’t help either. The bits that are supposed to hit hard hit like someone burping at you from a mile away and in songs like ‘Echoes’ and ‘Paranoid’, which otherwise would have been quite good songs, the lack of drive or weight to the production means they fall far short of what they could have been. The same is true of the album as a whole.

All of the songs are not up to scratch, even by Young Guns standard; the riffs are not terrible (save for the production) but the synth bits are pretty woeful and used far more than they should be if Young Guns are trying to steer away from the pop stuff; the lyrics are devoid of pretty much anything that you could call deep or meaningful or resonant, and mostly seem to revolve around cliches and metaphors so tired and thin you would be excused for mistaking them for a Travelodge carpet.

‘Echoes’ is an album that reminds you of a cake that someone has nicked the topping off of. You can still eat the sponge if you like, but it’s not going to be that great, it might do a little bit for you but by no means is it going to be as satisfying as the cake could have been.

ANDY LEDDINGTON

Their latest EP ‘Illuminate’ is, however, not as hype-inducing. This kind of metalcore demonstrated by bands like Oh, Sleeper and My Ticket Home was already sounding generic when first it was written and ‘Illuminate’ does nothing to break that mould.

The guitar work is nice, if somewhat basic. The breakdowns serve the purpose that every breakdown does (i.e. makes the listener want to headbang their computer monitor to dust) and the riffs are somewhat same-y throughout. There’s a lot of While She Sleeps style riffing (see ‘The Fires We Burn Are Boundless’, arguably the best song out of the five) but again it sounds very “I’ve heard this before” and Confessions Of A Traitor fall just shy of making that kind of sound their own.

The vocals are also fairly average; there is nothing wrong with MacConville’s delivery it just has a tendency to be fairly incidental when compared to the instrumentation behind it. When the clean vocals do appear, they are more than adequate, but the harsh vocals could definitely have benefited from a deeper and richer sound in the recording process.

‘Illuminate’, though far from the best or most original music ever made, is nonetheless energetic and fast-paced enough to carry the songs through a number of listens, and it’s easy to imagine limbs flying and heads banging to songs like ‘The Light We Possess Is Relentless’ in a live venue.

ANDY LEDDINGTON

Whilst such aspirations are admirable, The Brave’s debut album ‘Epoch’ may not be the giant mark-leaving rubber stamp they intended it to be. Opening track ‘Searchlights’ is probably the best indicator as to whether or not you will enjoy this album. Much of the song, and indeed the whole album, sounds very much like some Architects or Northlane, but slightly less original. It’s not bad enough to actually fault, but nor is it a genre-defining piece of music. At worst it has simply all been done before.

There are a handful of decently potent riffs scattered throughout, reminiscent occasionally of ‘There Is A Hell…’ era Bring Me The Horizon, and in the heavier sections even of August Burns Red. However these are few and far between, appearing only really every three songs or so. For the most part the album blurs together a bit. There is hardly any variation on the ideas presented, and despite them being fairly tried-and-tested ideas, songs like ‘Ignited Youth’ are the kind of ideas that have been tried beyond the point of testing and simply become a retelling of the kind of music Architects were doing half a decade ago.

Although there are no stand-out moments of genius that could have pushed this album into the higher reaches of musical class, there is also nothing especially bad about it. It is enjoyable for a listen or two and then fails to include anything else that would entice further listens.

ANDY LEDDINGTON

As a starting point for death metal this is a fairly good one. It isn’t so wildly abrasive or challenging as bands like Dååth or Mayhem can be, but nor is it so bland that it just becomes walls of heavy noise crashing over you like a stack of cardboard boxes in a warehouse accident. There are some lovely changes of pace from chest-beating groove riffs to eye-wateringly fast low-end thrash, and the guitar work throughout is far tastier than we were expecting going into listening to it for the first time.

Songs like ‘Army Of Chaos’ and ‘Condemned To Suffer’ are decent, although they like many others follow a very noticeable formula. It’s a good formula yes, and one that works for many of the songs, but when you can tell where the willy guitar bridge is going to be, and tell that the song is going to go half-pace chug before it actually happens, something needs to be changed.

And thus begins the unfortunate list of downsides to ‘Echoes Of The Tortured’. The main complaint is that the album is too long by far. Despite every other song being a short instrumental interlude, the twenty-one tracks could have benefited from a lot of trimming down, not least by getting rid of the aforementioned interludes which serve no purpose other than to break the slabs of somewhat basic death metal down into more manageable chunks.

‘Echoes Of The Tortured’ is a passable album, and there is more than enough to constitute a “good” listen. Sadly there isn’t enough originality or world-class performance to entice further listens, and on repeat plays through the lengthy nature causes interest to fade faster than an Alaskan sunset.

ANDY LEDDINGTON

Emp!re’s main strength has always been their choruses, and songs like ‘Sweet Apollo (Brighter Than The Sun)’ and ‘Sights’ have got ones that would put many of their contemporaries to shame. With his crazy range, Joe Green’s vocal lines turn what would otherwise be reasonably enjoyable, if a little ‘heard-this-all-before’, rock songs into something much bigger, something much more enjoyable and something that any fans of rock music would at least nod their head in appreciation too.

‘Our Simple Truths’ proves that Emp!re are ready to do a full-length album. If they can manage to write an album that keeps up the quality of the songs presented here then there’s no reason it shouldn’t be great. Put a song like ‘Sparrows’ next to basically anything that falls into the modern alt-rock wheelhouse and it will emerge victorious covered in blood and still grinning like a hyena.

ANDY LEDDINGTON