Two songs into this album and my first thoughts are these guys do the cock rocking goth metal better than Unto Others but are not quite on In Solitude's level. They also share more common ground with AFI than Unto Others. Their new front man Harley Mace, is actually the strongest element of their sound as he can belt it out with conviction. I am not sure however that I would call these guys death rock. Deathrock, as a dirtier sound. This lives in a zip code closer to Micheal Graves-era Misfits than it does 45 Grave or Christian Death. It is very high energy. Almost to a fault as they are racing through the graveyard when more dynamics might make it sound creepier, but at the current pace it feels more triumphant.
"Afterlife" does give the vocals more room to breathe. They even let things break down some, but the overall tone of the album finds things uniformly uptempo. Mace's baritone is the most interesting thing when it cuts through to take center stage. Not as Sunset Strip as 69 Eyes, the in-your-face nature of the album is more akin to the "Black Sails in the Sunset". They offer more nuance on "Last Light" making it one of the album's strongest songs. One thing I like about Mace is he employs varied vocal colors sometimes taking on more of a snarl, at other times dropping into an even lower register that is more Peter Steele-like. "End of Time" displays this really well.
Their formula begins to lose a little of its gas on "Seize the Night". It is just more of the same, though they do this one thing really well. "Sea of Trees" closes the album with a darker tone, and a shift into a more brooding mood that sheds the punk straight-ahead charge and languishes in the dusk, which is what this album needs more of. I can hear this song being played on a goth night. I will give this album a 9, it's really good if you miss the more punk days of AFI, but without Davey Havok's higher pitch shriek. This album drops April 19th on Seeing Red Records.
pst104
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