CD leaves listeners with mixed feelings

Melody and metal collide with mixed results in All That Remains’ upcoming release, “A War You Cannot Win.”

Drawing upon equal parts death metal and punktinged metalcore, “A War You Cannot Win” switches seamlessly from the heavy to almost poppy from track to track.

In the album opener “Down Through the Ages,” a fade-in riff leads to vocalist Phil Labonte’s guttural screams that mirror drummer Jason Costa’s rapidly insistent double-bass kicks which transitions to a surprisingly melodic chorus that could’ve been on an Avenged Sevenfold album circa 2003.

From there, the album turns to “You Can’t Fill My Shadow,” a heavier yet somewhat slower song that is so full of angst it should be on the soundtrack rotation at a Hot Topic.

The third track, “Stand Up,” sounds a little more like a hard rock band trying to play metal than a metal band trying to blister its audience’s ears. While I’m not a rabid metal fan, even I think this is somewhat of a milquetoast excuse for a metal song. It sounds more like Disturbed had a musical baby with one of the Jonas brothers: all lame hook and no heavy.

Thankfully for the latent metal head, the following track, “A Call to All Non-Believers,” takes a much harder edge, mixing lyrics about false gods and cults. The music itself is also slightly heavier but still lacks a truly head-banging power until the last minute or so.

“Asking Too Much” definitely fits in with the band’s metalcore image. However, it’s done almost perfectly: with the right amount of lovelorn angst, rage and bad-ass drumming. At first the song sounds like A Day To Remember B-side, poppy but not sappy and with an infectiously catchy chorus. Part of you wants to be annoyed by it, but the other part wants to slam dance for two of the three and a half minute song.

Sandwiched in after “Asking Too Much” is the 21-second palette cleanser of a acoustic audio clip “Intro.” It’s wildly out of place on the album, however. It seems odd to have an acoustic guitar clip on a metal album.

Acoustic humor aside, the seventh track “Just Moments in Time” gets back to hitting the listener in the gut with some alternately heavy and fiery guitar riffs and decidedly blistering drums from Costa. The lyrics seem to have somewhat “deep” overtones with lines like “…we come from nothing and we’re nothing when we die…” in the chorus.

Unfortunately again, following this track comes the big stinker on the album, “What If I Was Nothing.” It starts off like a Poison song and then gets worse from there, sounding like a Nickelback song. What in the hell is a staunch metalcore band that dabbles into death metal doing sounding like a bunch of hick-town Canucks? Instead of pondering this brain buster, just hit “next.”

The next song, “Sing or Liberty,” sounds like a metal version of Rise Against, which is a huge improvement over sounding like Nickelback. It is equal parts punk and death metal and all hard and fast. It even has a furiously played, if somewhat brief, guitar solo that just begs one to bang one’s head.

The next track, “Not Fading,” sounds a tad lighter but still packs a punch, especially highlighting bassist Jeanne Sagan and another swirling guitar solo. All in all it sounds a bit like Coheed & Cambria without the inter-galactic warfare.

“Calculating Loneliness,” another acoustic track, could’ve been left off entirely or at least shortened to less than a minute instead of about two and half minutes. Short acoustic clips are okay to give listeners a quick intermission, but no one needs to hear meandering acoustic guitars on a metal album.

The album finishes with the title track and is again in the vein of A Day To Remember albeit mixed with a heavy dose of Coheed & Cambria. That interesting blend results in a very worthy fist-pumping track that mixes a seriously powerful drum line with relentless riffing. On the whole, the album has some very bright spots but gets bogged down with too many unsavory tracks mixed in so that it never really hits its stride. The poor mixing leaves the listener digging it one track, and dry-heaving the next.

Advocate Staff