Earlier this week, veteran metalcore act, August Burns Red, announced that they would be releasing their next album on June 30th, which is truly excellent news if this album maintains the momentum the band picked up during Rescue & Restore, their most recent release. Oddly enough, while Rescue & Restore has been the band’s best performing album to date, for one reason or another, it never quite grew out of the shadow cast by their 2007 release, Messengers. I have to say though, I can understand how thing happened, Messengers really shook up the metalcore scene when it came out 8 years it. It brought the technicality of the genre up to never before seen levels; it introduced a new formula to metalcore, one that would perpetuate the genre’s sound to years to come.
But it really did become a formula. Now every metalcore band can play really fast, they all have guitar riffs that will turn your mind into a pretzel trying to decipher it, drummers that come with a few extra limbs, and pulsing, brutal breakdowns. What they made new, is not new anymore. And while that album helped to set the precedent, the genre needed to move on. But so many people stuck to that formula cause they were good at it, and honestly, it wasn’t too terribly hard to be good at it. The imagination and dynamics were nowhere to be found. Even August Burns Red themselves were guilty of it, I remember writing a review of Constellations back when it came out and using that exact word, “formulaic”, it followed that pattern to a T. There wasn’t enough diversity or dynamics. It was a good album, it just wasn’t a special album.
At this point I honestly sort of wrote the band off as another victim to the metalcore complex, I still liked them, I just didn’t really expect anything groundbreaking anymore. But of course, silly me. When 2013 rolled around, and they released “Rescue & Restore”, August Burns Red raised the bar once again, they brought back what had been missing from the metalcore sound they helped create.
The track “Spirit Breaker” is a perfect example of what they managed to create with this album. It features the same achingly technical, battling guitar work that everyone expects from them, but then injects a sense of melody when necessary. It does away with riffs that you need to try to catch up with, and lets a single, clear, harmonized melody break out of the technical riffs as it goes into a truly melodic and relaxed bridge. And over this bridge we get a different, unfamiliar sort of technicality from the drums – which are always absolutely awe inspiring, anyway – and adds a groove. A simple groove, a little swing to the tempo, with almost jazz-like characteristics as Matt Greiner can deviate from the standard groove as the bass takes the lead to play some of the most captivating and intricate drum work I’ve ever heard; not in the same sort of blast beat, double kick sort of intricate, but truly fascinating. Or “Beauty in Tragedy” that captures a similar dynamic level, going from great highs, to lulls driven by tension into huge crescendos, all accompanied by amazing grooves from both the guitars and drums.
And that’s just one song, the whole album features these brilliant deviations from the old formula that the genre followed so stringently for nearly a decade. It was a huge breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale sound that was pushed on by so many countless bands. Rescue & Restore is truly the gem of August Burns Red’s career up to this point. It showed a huge level of music maturation from all corners of the band, and they managed to put together a very interesting take on their classic sound. If this new album continues to push what they started with Rescue & Restore, it will be a major contender for album of the year, much like R&R was in 2013. I, for one, will be very much looking forward to hearing what they’ve got this June.
