Warped tour 08 was my favorite warped tour of all time. (04 is a close second with Alk3, Underoath, TBS, Coheed, Yellowcard, and Senses fail all in their fucking prime) I don’t think i spent even a second at one of the two main stages. Once i got there and got my backstage press pass i took to the opposite way then the rest of the journalists who started to creep the buses and stake out key spots on the two stages where the big names were making their name heard by the mass of kids who just planted their bodies for a Paramore spotting or a Cobra Starship sighting, I instead booked it for the Smartpunk stage, put on my shades and got fucked up to A Day to Remember, Sky Eats Airplane, Four Year Strong, Set Your Goals, Evergreen Terrace, and this little English Metal outfit called Bring Me The Horizon. I remember being slumped in the corner during a load out/load in and these kids bomb onto the stage and just fucking explode into spastic little party machines. These kids tore shit up, The second they got done playing i made a run for their merch tent and picked up as much BMTH shit as i could fit into my already brimming bag full of free shirts and cds. Let me say this, the couple of Bring Me The Horizon Shirts that i got that day are some of the only shirts i have paid money for in quite some time, usually i just get the shit for free from labels or bands as thank yous but these kids got even my money, a rare feat to pull these days.

So i haven’t Heard past Bring Me The Horizon efforts but this one brings some fucking avalanche type landslides to your body in the form of brutal riffing and breakdowns. This could easily be a rehashing of their old material and i would never know it but if you are picking up this as your first BMTH release than rest assured you will have some damn fine catchy British metal to explode to. They suffer from the one crippling fact of metal which is every song is played in the same drop tuned power chords so of course all of their songs are going to sound the same, but the energy and aggressiveness they put behind each song picks up any slack left buy common signatures or progressions. Songs like “The Comedown” and “No Need For Introductions, Ive Read About Girls Like You On The Back Of Toilet Doors” show just how fucking brutal metal can still be. If you are into metal than get into these kids cause they can get you to that point where you smash your windows out on accident. They arnt nearly as technical as most of their peers are these days but they can fucking trench their way through the beats just as well and put some heavy ass lows into what they do and how they do it.

Young metal is taking over all sorts of games these days with bands like Bring Me The Horizon, Arsonists Get All Of The Girls, and I Wrestled A Bear Once, the only question is do you listen to this sort of Armageddon Operatic Noodling shit or do you rock some David Bazan? My question is, can’t you do both?

When i First heard The Sounds of Animals Fighting it was the mastery of “Tiger and the Duke” that blew my mind away, It was this post punk progressive piece of work that combined the Guitar prowess of Finch and Rx Bandits with the vocals of Saosin and the newly formed Circa Survive. The songs ripped, the verses shredded, and the beats were in some of the greatest time signatures ever. It just owned me and everything i was thinking about music at that time. Then with their next Release “Lover the lord has left us” and it falls under the classification of “It Grows on you”, i hated that thing for lets say the first 100 spins, but i did eventually give in to the art aspect and started to dig it for the effort put into the originality and the musicianship.

This new album is a complete mix of the Tiger/Duke and Lover/lord. Ocean/sun Has moments of insane riffing over unique drum signatures like in the song “The Heraldic Beak Of The Manufacturer’s Medallion” which could have easily been on Tiger/Duke, while it also gives into the art aspect of finding a distant melody and stretching it to its tensile lengths like in “The Leather Lung” where reverb and delay and echo run game over single note picking eschewed leads. And Ocean/Sun seems to split itself into two states of mind, the first half of the album is more akin to Lover/Lord while the second half plays out as an annex to Tiger/Duke, There is something here for every TSOAF fan.

Overall i would say that this could be their most well rounded album offering up all sorts of audible goodies for anyone whose willing to drop the 10 bucks and put an ear to the stereo for an hour. If you like either of their last two albums then you must continue on the mystic journey of this Clandestine group of musicians who would have you test your boundaries for what you may or may not think is art.

Plus 14 year old girls love Anthony Green, HAHAHAHAHHAHA.

The only pleasant part about writing this review for Escape the Fate is that i get to retell the delightful tale of that idiot Ronnie Radke, The former meth snorting former front man for ETF (probably still snorts meth, definitely doesn’t have a career left in the music industry). So Ronnie was widely known in the Circles that us Music journalists run as a toxic Element, basically dude was a drugged up asshole who said stupid shit and did dumb things and thought he was cool cause his “Album” (loose word usage there) was in Hot Topic. Well the idiot fixed his situation for the rest of us normal human beings from being involved with him anymore when he set up a fucking old school duel out in the Nevada desert, Apparently 2 kids he knew were fighting so he set up a street fight among the cactus and jackrabbits on the outskirts of Vegas. Everyone brought guns though and one of the kids died, Great idea Ronnie. So then law enforcement catches wind of this and goes after Ronnie and the dude that killed the other kid, Well the dude that committed the murder killed himself out of guilt i am assuming and left Ronnie on his own so what does he do? Thats right he doesn’t turn himself in, he goes on the lamb and evades the cops for like 6 months or something. Dude is the equivalent of human trash. He eventually gets caught and arrested for the crime and get sentenced, Where in prison he makes an ass out of himself in poor taste and blames the dead kids family for him getting arrested and says its their fault that he is in prison getting rapped. Ronnie is then kicked out of the band to his very public displeasure. Thats where Craig from Bless the Fall came in, Oh yeah!

I can say what i want to about Escape the Fate being Garbage cause they were but they at least used to have an understanding on how to pander to the kids musical tastes, I don’t know if this is a natural sophomore slump album or if the addition of Craig did it, but the music is just generic and the vocals are horribly stagnant. This album could have easily come out in 2003 and been considered outdated. There are no real Engaging riffs anywhere on the record and Mabbits Lyrics are soooooooooooo …Dumb. I don’t know a more precise word to describe his lyrics, maybe juvenile. Someone should forward him that memo that got sent around 15 years ago that said your choruses were no longer aloud to use the words (baby, love, girl, heart, and crazy) cause the dude didn’t get the copy that was left on his desk. The only thing i can say about this album is that it fails from laziness, they are bands that still do what these guys do and keep it relevant. It is possible to do this and not suck, and these dudes are competent enough musicians to pull off a second rate My Chemical Romance thing, they just don’t. It seems that they are content with sinking to the bottom of the emotional rock lake and affix themselves via chain to a giant rock to spend the rest of their days where the sunlight is thin and the fish talk shit on Fashion whores.

Avoid this if you can at all costs, instead invest your time in one of the millions of other relevant Epitaph record artists such as Thursday, Gallows, Our last night, Bring me the Horizon, Story of the Year, or New Found Glory.

I was stoked on this new release, possibly more stoked on it then i should have been, And when the band started to fall apart, it hurt me a little bit more then it should have. Kerith and Brian (who i originally thought were brother and sister but ended up being married) Got all Mark Whalberg in there and Departed. And with them went a big part of the sound that caught my attention in the second place, The violin and the synth were pretty much done for, and the female backup vocals were now in jeopardy. But still i anticipated this album with beaded sweat. Boy if future Brenden could only quantum leap back in time and tell old Brenden to move on and forget about this band i could’ve saved like a collective 20 minutes of my life waiting for this album.

Its just not the same. “Those We Leave Behind” just doesn’t cut the cake. I’ll tell you what it leaves behind is the fans of the band. They didn’t replace the violin sound and the female vocals are still there but not as prominent. That was a HUGE part of their sound, and not its just completely absent. The album still tries to go for the dark thespian roll with huge melodies and vocal lines a plenty dedicated to dark subject matter such as zombies and graveyards (two things I’m a sucker for). But overall the album just seems like a lackluster attempt at creating their debut. This is a stereotypical sophomore slump album. The guitar is more produced leaving out some of the crunch that gave the word metal some validity when it was brought up on their past releases.

If you were a fan of the first two I Am Ghost albums then leave it at that friend. This release is forgettable and will just soil your thoughts on what this band should be. Maybe they will learn from their mistakes on this album and grow a little bit, mature their sound, and get a violin back in there.

This album is just harmless fun, if you can’t appreciate the joke then you are too into yourself and most likely would frown on the idea of grabbing a family size bag of Funyons, some Ecto Cooler Hi-C juice boxes, a House of Pain mixtape, and heading to the river for a day. And if this is the case then i invite you to suck it.
The two bros of ISMFOF have created a great little parody of your stereotypical screamsing core band and in doing so make something that i would rather listen to then the original product. This kid matt has fairly impressive control over his screaming range pulling off everything from inverted screams and squeals, to mid range/high range and cookie monster vocals, and Nabils work on all other instruments raise the eye to exactly how much of a joke this is to him. If i was Nabil i would want to save some of these technical riffs for something more akin to a real project, but the level of musicianship he displays here is a breathe of fresh air.

This album is just a great joke on your average rise records or tragic hero records. Its got rap songs on it (their cover of “Crank that (Soulja boy) and their original “HxC 2 step”) its got skits, its got those vocoded and autotunned vocal stylings that are so popular with todays youth. Breakdowns? yep. It is just a goodtime that you can put on and some of your friends might think its funny and some of your friends will complain about how long the new postal service lp is taking instead of listening to a single note.

If Weird Al Yankovic took a jab at the alternative music scene you might get something simillar to this, although i think these two do a damn fine job at picking your average swooping haircut/white belt apart and showing the fun to still be had with music.

Victory was already doing pretty well on the technical metal land war with Between the buried and me, falling continent after continent to their mighty riffage. But to add A Hero A Fake to their roster just pretty much made a nuclear arsenal available. Its rare to find 5 or 4 good musicians who can get together and all play extremely technical fast math parts. I can only name a couple of the top of my head who can do a fine enough job at it to garner my attention, Dillinger Escape Plan are of course the God fathers of the genre, Between the Buried and Me are the time tested composition masters whose albums should be compared more to Beethoven, Mozart, and Wagner than the works of slayer, and Protest the hero were the new kids on the block with an unmatched speed and zest for theatrical vocal lines. Now i can add A hero A Fake to this list and move them into the NKOTB slot.

A Hero A Fake have one interesting addition to the already proven method of double bass, 808 sonic boom, and time signature specific guitar tapping and that is the vocals. At most points on the record you get your Atypical growl voice from the lead singer, but at others you get the guitar player chipping in with clean parts that would be easily found as choruses on any new rise records release. Its a fairly fresh approach to technical metal, you get these booming fast tech math parts and then out of nowhere you get this huge melodic chorus (check the tracks Superwoman and F16 for this).

I am very stoked on this record, its littered with amazing clear delay pedal works as well as the heaviest of heavys (check out the tracks Sinfonia and Terminal for this). These dudes took their time writing this album and the attention to detail shows. Its such and engrossing piece of work as well, its an album that makes you want to hunker down on a bean bag with a 12 pack of Capri Suns and some Totinos pizza rolls and just zone out while starring at a magic eye poster.

Bottom line is if you find yourself digging technical metal in the vein of Protest the hero, Dillinger escape plan, and Between the Buried and me then run your ass down to Kmart and secure yourself a copy of this bands debut album “Volatile”.

Michigan’s right now is kind of like long island in 02 and new jersey in 04, the place is just birthing great band after great band, meanwhile covering damn near every musical genre as they fight inches at a time to put their names on the map, and at the lead of all of this, I Am Abomination seems to have the best chance of getting themselves and their brother bands on regular rotation of label signings.

Onto the music itself. Guitarist Nick Sampson must have grown up with a copy of Crossroads on VHS and watched the part with Steve Vai (Who played all of the guitar parts in this movie and also the role of the devils personal Guitarsmith) playing Fifth Caprice by Niccolo Paganini cause this kid can mother fucking shred the shit out of a guitar, the dude pulls off arpeggios like they are nothing, The kid could easily slip into the ranks of Between The Buried And Me and show them a thing or two about speed metal. And the best part is that he doesn’t overpower or overshadow the rest of the band. If i was Zach Phelps (on rhythm guitar) or Brandon Good (on bass) i would be afraid to try to keep up with him but All of the strings flow together so easily that you spend a good amount of time wondering if the wool is not being pulled over your eyes and you are in fact listening to an album made by robots that would require the likes of Dragonforce level studio musicians to pull of live. The Drums are just as competent as any other aspect of the album and have that great metal groove thats not too mathy too dance to yet still has enough fills and meat to listen to without drowning out in cymbal splashes and repetitive arrangements.

And then there are the vocals of Phil Druyor who adds a genre bending factor to the group that keeps them fresh and out of the anti mainstream unaccessible cemetery’s that most tech metal bands find themselves six feet underground in. Druyor’s amazingly well controlled range allows him to pull of some harmonies most bands would need an autotuner to even attempt yet alone feel comfortable performing live with, and his stark lyrical images fit both the aggressive nature of the music along with the octaves he soars through giving you a nice escape from realism reminiscent of the same style of Bukowski/Vonnegut  noir and violence flavored storytelling that influenced bands like Senses Fails and Chiodos.

Add the touches of flair that come with the synth programming that lines the songs and gives them that nice  terminator 2 action movie soundtrack feel (as found on track 4 “The Next Great American Tragedy”) and the guitar highlights such as the 80s echoed guitar squeals that would make Eddie Van Halen smile with pride (just check out the intro to track 6 “Music Gone Wild!), and you have yourselves a well rounded catchy technical metal album that will earn this band a hardcore fan base who within a years time will be bragging about how many times they have seen the band live while waiting in the rain outside of the venue 4 hours early in hopes to grab that nice warm spot waiting for them against the barricade at the foot of the stage.

Bottom line is this, I Am Abomination has the raw talent and early head start that most bands would die for and for a first attempt at an album Jaw Dropper lives up to its name, its only downside could be found in the length of the composition. Its been a very short time that its been in my presence and i already feel the pressure of getting in contact with the band and asking them when they plan on writing the follow up building against my spine.

This album has a lot going for it and i feel comfortable in stating that the 100,000 plus kids who had their hearts crushed when The Early November decided to retire can now invest their time in an equally catchy and fun act with 1997. A good majority of this is due to guitarist Caleb Pepp who seems to be in the same class of songwriting monster that Ace Enders seems to be.  I feel that Caleb made a much stronger offering this time around and the addition of the bands second Female vocalist/pianist (after the first one left) helped out as well, her voice was much more angelic and less pop star oriented. Unfortunately she abandoned the project in the middle of a tour taking the bass player with her and somewhat crippling the band for some period of time. The gang is now on their third female vocalist/pianist search and already in pre-production for their third album as of this albums review.

The music is that same indie rock orchestral sound that has been catching ears for years and can be comparable to Straylight Run, The Hush Sound, and This providence at times, but these boys and girls seem to do it with a just more zest. They have the chance for a mainstream merge without compromising their values and that has been shown with the more mature offering that “On The Run” is compared to their debut “A Better View Of The Rising Sun”. While Straylight Run always seemed close to becoming a VH1 rotation artist it just never played  out for them in the right way and eventually Female vocalist and family member Michelle fled the band for a more solo themed career. But these kids have the chance and lets hope they take every precaution available in the quest for a new Female lead.

If all the stars fall in the right places their next album should be the successful equivalent of The Early Novembers “The Rooms Too Cold”. I think there are a lot of kids still wandering out there looking for a replacement to TEN and they should point their attention to this band for a while and see if the ingredients arn’t here for what they are looking for.

Overall a great album that seems to be loosing steam quickly due to member changes and bad memories, get on this train while you still can and while the band still has enough horsepower to stay in the game.

But What exactly is emo? Ask any self respecting band this question today and they will deny that moniker until the day they die (story of the year reference). So if no bands claim to be Emo then how can it be a genre? thats simple, because the term Emo is a put down and diss that has been running in the game longer than most of the kids that run with that term have been alive. The origin of the word is not rooted in the dashboard confessional pussy rock that now dominates the false genre, but actually in 80s DC hardcore. Ian MacKaye was running out of steam with the political balls to the walls life he was leading as front man for hardcore forefathers Minor Threat, so he founded the post hardcore elite super group Fugazi.

FROM THIS...

Fugazis bread and butter were emotions, the kind of wear your heart on your sleeve subject matter that was fresh as hell back in the day. It was rare to hear someone talking about love hurting so much that self mutilation was comparable and as innovative as it was at the time MacKaye was still catching shit for it, not from the mainstream media cause they couldn’t give a shit about him, but from his family that was still active in the hardcore circles. They labeled his new style of musical choices as “EmoCore” which was short for emotional hardcore. It was an in-joke, a jab, and a cute little back and forth between buds. But in reality it was the birth of a fucking monster.

But as always the music caught on and similar bands started popping up on the radar including Rites Of Spring, Embrace, and Fire Party started to build their own little scene. Then the nation started to catch on with acts like Seattle’s Sunny Day Real Estate and New Yorks Texas Is The Reason, these bands also rooted their lyrics and manners in Emotionally charged subjects so they were tagged like a Brooklyn metro train.

Finally Saves The Day who awkwardly enough started as a lifetime influenced punk band ushered in a new wave a finger pointing but this time it stuck and for good it did. Emo was now a buzz word following bands that were mixing their pop and romance so tightly that their entire aesthetic was based on heartbreak, and soon enough the term watered down to the point where if you had distortion and sung about either violence and love in the same song than you were one of those prissy Emo bitches. It was at this phase were bands like Taking Back Sunday, Brand New, Senses Fail, And Thursday that were trying to make some god honest Post hardcore music.

TO THIS?

The bands that came in the next wave like Hawthorne Heights, Hellogoodbye, and Alesana never had a chance. while some of them used the term for publicity (Hawthorne Heights) others just got caught up in the romance and money just started getting numb to the term. And then things really started getting out of hand. Pop punk started getting sucked into the Emo machine and now all of a sudden Fallout Boys brand of quick witted anthems that were so obviously pop punk in nature now fell under the umbrella of Emo’s spindly fictitious fingers. So if someone calls Fallout Boy Emo than that means All time low is Emo and all other current pop punk bands too.

WELL WHAT THE FUCK.

This isn’t real, none of this is real. Some dudes were throwing some words at one of their friends to give them shit and all of this is the result. Its the biggest fucking joke to ever hit the music scene and its a damn shame that a majority of kids today keep getting sucked into the obvious quicksand of stupidity. Hell they embrace the term. I will take this one thought to my grave though. I remember a world before cellphones that relied on landlines, a world before the internet that relied on word of mouth, and a world before Emo where kids were smart enough to stick the basics of metal, punk, and rock.

Sure genres are necessary to a certain degree, if i want to find a band that sounds like Some Girls i would like to know that their are bands that are similar and referred to as grindcore, And if Blink 182 isn’t enough for me than i sure thank god that pop punk was coined, but to feed into this stupid bullshit joke for this many years and to take it to the level where the nightly news runs special reports on kids being in danger of self from their Emo personalities than i say fuck genres get a mixtape and start to ignore those three sub categories under the band names on myspace.

P.S. sorry to the dudes in the bands Motionless In White(front page image) and Alesana(the after of the before and afters above) for using their picture to make my point but god damn those haircuts. They were asking for it.

before we made it from the security check to the actual stage area we saw some kid blowing chunks in the bathroom and with in like 3 minutes another kid did the same on the floor about 3 feet from me. Meaning 1 of 2 things, 1: Either it was like outbreak up in that mother and we were in desperate need of Dustin Hoffman to run some tests 4 billion times or 2: some 14 year olds decided to split either a whole bartles and james wine cooler or 1 single shot of some manner of flavored liquor so they could get super drunk and have a story for home period the next day.

Four Letter Lie played second and I was kind of into seeing them. I hated their first album and wrote them off as a horrible underoath rip off but was fairly impressed with their sophomore attempt so i had interest at least. They were mediocre as a band but their lead singer poured so much into his performance that i got mad at everyone that was sharing the stage with that dude. They seriously let him down and hold him back. the kid put so much behind each scream that you could tell he meant every word he yelled with his full heart. it was inspiring and impressive to say the least. I would like to see that kid succeed cause this whole god damn generation needs to take a page out of his book and put some god damn heart behind what they are doing and not just stand on stage and try to out pose each other. But overall the band was pretty plain cut besides his lead. Not necessarily bad but definitely boring, lazy, and not as active as the music suggested they should have been.

Breathe Carolina was so obnoxious and annoying that we had to leave multiple times to the bar at the other side of the building. It was loud, overbearing, and frightening to see the reaction they were getting from their tween followers. They had no backing band but instead a couple of dudes running sequencers and midi controllers. for christ sakes its one thing to not have a drummer but utilize the space on stage in some way. its been so long since i have seen a band without drums (last time was probably idiot pilot) that it was eerie to see the void just collecting dust. SOOOOO BAAAAD.

When we came back for Pierce The Veil i wasn’t expecting as much as my bud who had previously reviewed their album and found himself a fan. So when they had an intro that involved the tales from the crypt theme and a walk on by some dude dressed up like the crypt keeper his god damned self than i just got stoked on it. I hadn’t really paid much attention to this band on their recordings but i was caught off guard by the lead singers voice and his pitch and control. It was so damn high, like Claudio Sanchez (Coheed/Cambria) high. I can only compare it to seeing Coheed live for the first time and never hearing of them before. It was a surprise. I feel like i would have had a much better time watching them play if i would have known any of their songs and wasn’t watching my cell phone clock so we could get out of their with enough time before mikes movie madness closed on account of the fact that i had movies that were past due and we had to get a copy of slaughterhouse 5 or else. But yeah they seemed pretty solid and Ryan was sold on their drummer having what seemed like a blast with his kit.

Long story short i am going to get a good listen in before i go see pierce the veil again, Breathe Carolina made me want to sacrifice myself, Four Letter Lies Screamer deserves a good damn medal for his commitment to live performance, and someone needs to tell me what Emarosa sound like live.