If Hope Dies - Life In Ruin
This album starts off with the heart stopping "Burned Out" which had me pumped that If Hope Dies, a band that had broken away from the generic metalcore pack with the outstanding "The Ground Is Rushing Up To Meet Us", would cement their place as a true front runner of the genre. How quickly I would be proved wrong.
After that stunning opening track, the cracks in the armor of "Life In Ruin" appear almost immediately. The second song, which starts off in a more aggressive vein than even their past work, is hideously disfigured with an almost clean vocal radio friendly sing along chorus that rears its ugly head over and over again in later songs as well. Add in an uncharacteristic reliance on hackneyed breakdowns that sit in stark contrast to their prior inventive use of them and the unwelcome introduction of simplistic hard rock riffs and the picture starts to look a little grim.
This is disheartening as at their best If Hope Dies comes across as a sinister, slower version of As I Lay Dying, with impassioned vocals just short of screams of torture and a thread the needle precision to their breakdowns. Inject a shot of Darkest Hour's penchant for tasteful twin melodic lead guitar work and you get the idea of the level these guys are capable of playing at but, outside of a couple songs and some riffs scattered here and there, they rarely hit that mark here. Instead the breakdowns are trite, the vocals are bereft of their biting, urgent edge and overall song complexity is definitely dumbed down.
Because of this I can't help but the feeling this album must have been a conscious move into a more friendly sound, like they surgically removed the elements that made them unique and replaced them with mosh-proven off the shelf breakdowns and time tested melodeath riffs that sound fine but, outside of the exceptional execution, are hard to distinguish from the myriad metalcore acts out today. This gives a majority of this record a serviceable but shopworn feel, acceptable for an aging band whose best work is behind it but still has tons of fans, but not for a brand new band in a heavily saturated genre. So a metalcore release like this, slightly stale but solid in form, is a lot like day old bread. It's great if you're starving but with so many bands baking this same bread there's no reason to single this out like its predecessor. I may be coming down a little too harshly as this band still has top notch production and great musicianship but I guess I just expected a lot more out the three year wait between albums.
Hopefully this is just another example of a sophomore slump and they will ditch their bid for center stage at Ozzfest (or whatever reason they moved into this safer direction) and return to form on their next effort. Otherwise If Hope Dies could end up like so many bands, one great album in their name followed by a string of also-rans.
After that stunning opening track, the cracks in the armor of "Life In Ruin" appear almost immediately. The second song, which starts off in a more aggressive vein than even their past work, is hideously disfigured with an almost clean vocal radio friendly sing along chorus that rears its ugly head over and over again in later songs as well. Add in an uncharacteristic reliance on hackneyed breakdowns that sit in stark contrast to their prior inventive use of them and the unwelcome introduction of simplistic hard rock riffs and the picture starts to look a little grim.
This is disheartening as at their best If Hope Dies comes across as a sinister, slower version of As I Lay Dying, with impassioned vocals just short of screams of torture and a thread the needle precision to their breakdowns. Inject a shot of Darkest Hour's penchant for tasteful twin melodic lead guitar work and you get the idea of the level these guys are capable of playing at but, outside of a couple songs and some riffs scattered here and there, they rarely hit that mark here. Instead the breakdowns are trite, the vocals are bereft of their biting, urgent edge and overall song complexity is definitely dumbed down.
Because of this I can't help but the feeling this album must have been a conscious move into a more friendly sound, like they surgically removed the elements that made them unique and replaced them with mosh-proven off the shelf breakdowns and time tested melodeath riffs that sound fine but, outside of the exceptional execution, are hard to distinguish from the myriad metalcore acts out today. This gives a majority of this record a serviceable but shopworn feel, acceptable for an aging band whose best work is behind it but still has tons of fans, but not for a brand new band in a heavily saturated genre. So a metalcore release like this, slightly stale but solid in form, is a lot like day old bread. It's great if you're starving but with so many bands baking this same bread there's no reason to single this out like its predecessor. I may be coming down a little too harshly as this band still has top notch production and great musicianship but I guess I just expected a lot more out the three year wait between albums.
Hopefully this is just another example of a sophomore slump and they will ditch their bid for center stage at Ozzfest (or whatever reason they moved into this safer direction) and return to form on their next effort. Otherwise If Hope Dies could end up like so many bands, one great album in their name followed by a string of also-rans.
