Upon first listening to the slowly gathering gothic-nouveau intro on this followup to Atreyu's 2002 debut, Suicide Notes and Butterfly Kisses, there stirred in me a cautious hope that just maybe the Orange County fivesome might be able to do some legitimate work towards redeeming my as of now quite disenchanted take on hardcore rock and roll.
I see a hand in the front row. Why is that, you ask? Well, I'll take your questions but only one at a time.
Q. Fine, first question. Why would this slowly crescendoing mixture of feeding back guitars, haunting ghost choir arpeggiations, muted human screams and the intonations of various sinister yet compelling stringed instruments that may or may not have been generated on a synthesizer deserve anything more than a perfunctory listen in a day and age when nearly every "unbearably and devastatingly tyrannically brutal yet heartbreakingly passionately openly emotional" hardcore band tries to incorporate some dark moodsetter of an intro or interlude into their album?
A. Whoa... Slow down Mr. Roget. Sounds like you need to cut back on the Starbucks. Yeah. I do hate the fact that like almost everything in hardcore today, "instrumental songs" and perhaps even more so the abuse of the "intro" is something that bothers me. It bespeaks a lack of creativity and originality unless it's pulled off just right. The only reason I'm saying I was hopeful (sheesh I didn't even get to saying I "liked" it) was that I thought the fact that Artax, excuse me Atreyu, pulled off a cool intro might mean that they were getting back to basics. Turns out that's a polarizing concept on this album.
What I mean by that is this; in a nutshell, while growth and innovation are of course indispensable in nearly every genre, sometimes you just need to go back to square one and do what you know how to do best. Sadly, Atreyu doesn't do that. Instead they go the route of so many bands these days who are trying to weld together several pieces of metal (no pun intended) that just don't fit.
Things that fall into the category of not fitting are things like playing a style of music that goes well with a screamed vocal, having a frontman who can indeed scream fairly well, and then deciding that it's ok for him to start singing a lot of the time. Alex Varkatzas' voice, incidentally, is not terrible. It has this kind of loungy, grungy warble to it on the higher notes, some character, but in the end succumbs to the fact that the melody lines, especially on the second half of the album, are indistinguishable from one another. That and the fact that he doesn't actually have a great voice. Not a bad one. But not a really, really, good one, which he would have needed to make this work.
It was cool at first maybe, for a New York minute, the whole let's-transition-from-a-super-heavy-breakdown-to-a-four-chord-chorus-with-a-melody-sung-over-it thing. But it's not anymore. Nor is singing or, as the case may be, bellowing about girls on every song. That's for New Found Glory. I want new found riffing. I want new found double bass drive-bys. I want Atreyu to follow in the footsteps of Martyr A.D. whom they're obviously influenced by and just play hard core rock and roll. I'm not gonna spell it out. I don't want to do their job for them. But let's get even more riffs and breakdowns in there and less... how to say this... less crooning. AC/DC didn't tour the world for thirty years for nothing. I want to drive downtown with my windows down and get my freaking chug on.
Q. Ben! What are you talking about!? You rail against the dastardly chug in two out of three reviews you write!! Simple riffs? MORE Double Bass? You're being totally inconsistent!!!
A. Well, for starters I so oft rail against the chug because Julia sends me crappy chug bands half the time. Not my fault. Secondly, you're misunderstanding the scope of my vitriol. I do hate the chug. Everywhere, that is, except in its proper context.
But enough of my talk. Let's go to the album for an example. Following that suspect goth intro lies the album's strongest track, "Bleeding Mascara". If you can listen to this song, complete with an actual guitar lead (several of which spice up the album) and a breakdown which is both thundering and catchier than any ABBA song, then I take my hat off to you in some twisted way. "You Eclipsed By Me" and the speedy "Corseting" are the other prime examples of the simplicity, drive, rhythmic consistency and overall energy that's lacking elsewhere. They've got the witty, wrists-nimbler-than-David-Copperfield strum patterns, the precise percussive onslaught, a good hardcore vocal with its own quirks (including going up into the feline shriek at the end of some lines, again ala Martyr A.D.) I dig. The guitar tones on these songs are amazing. So razor sharp and bright that they cut right through the throaty drum and bass package. Think vintage Strung Out or Bleeding Through. The Triple Rectifier at its best, or something close to that.
So those three songs are great. Sadly, the album as a whole doesn't follow through. There are twelve full length songs here, only 25% of which are compelling.
That second half of the album I mentioned earlier? It's a papier-mache made out of more mediocre singing, fuzzycrunch guitar tones, and chords grabbed in drop d tuning than you can shake a pair of From Autumn to Ashes' socks at.
At the end of the day, the OC boys' apparent eagerness to be safely headed in the right direction on the highway of new hardcore has left them in the slow lane as far as interesting output goes, and undermined what could have been an even stronger album. Still, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt as far as their motivations are concerned. For the handful of tracks I've mentioned and because of the reality that you know your hardcore tastes better than me, The Curse is worth checking out.
2.5/4
Similar sounding releases
2005Haste the DayWhen Everything Falls
2005A Change of PaceAn Offer You Can't Refuse
2004Strung OutExile In Oblivion
2003BelovedFailure On
2005Hand to HandA Perfect Way to Say Goodbye
2004Odd ProjectThe Second Hand Stopped
