August Burns Red- Messengers (7/10)

Honestly, all things aside, I don't think many people expected this band to last when they first heard them. I remember my very first conversations with friends about them, and I think the general consensus was August Burns Red is the culmination of everything popular going on in the metal/hardcore music scene; all aspects rolled into one big metalcore machine, and I think we just assumed everyone would see them as that. And then they became a guilty pleasure band for us.

Well, with Messengers, they are not so much guilty, but still quite pleasurable. August Burns Red is a band that has refined what they do to perfection in a very short time, and as a result, I feel strongly that they deserve credit, regardless of the originality of the band. This album sounds about as crushing, tight, and technical as metalcore gets.

Musically, I'm going to go ahead and say there's not much groundbreaking happening in Pennsylvania, but there is quite a bit of intelligent writing. The disc, along with Amon Amarth's latest, contains some very catchy metal "hooks" (I use quotes because there is no hook as effective as a well written singing melody, something you're not going to find here). Instead of relying on singing choruses (see As I Lay Dying, Destroy the Runner, other irritating band), you get super catchy rhythms in breakdowns, well written guitar melodies, and vocal rhythms, all of which manage to get stuck in your head, regardless of the abrasive nature of the music.

This ultimately impresses me. ABR will lose a substantial amount of street cred (not that they ever had any) by being so catchy, but albums will sell, and lo and behold, look who's getting ready to be Solid State Records' flagship band? The success of this record alone attests to it's appeal to a wide variety of fans. I know it converted me, and other skeptics that croon from their high horses that the band is "too GENERIC!"

Production wise, everything sounds perfect, and that is probably the greatest improvement from the last record. The drums are recorded incredibly well, with significant effort put into each small effects cymbal, while the needed punch and fullness is present in each tom. The kick booms but sounds natural, and the snare cuts through the music just hard enough to scream at you without making you cringe. The guitar tone is pretty nice; a blistering distortion without losing much tone, and another thing they do on this record is make use of effects in a creative way. The vocals sound worlds better, and I'm a much bigger fan of the new vocalists style. On the last record, the vocalist layered so many vocal parts that it was completely obvious to the listener that he couldn't perform them all live.

The packaging is nothing special, and the lyrics are my only real complaint (there's nothing profound about "One nation, under God, it's us against the world." In fact, it's a little disturbing). Overall, this record can't get greater than a 7 in my book, because a) while good at what they do, they cover very little new ground in heavy music b) the lyrics are below expectations given the norm in this genre and c) this album does have it's weak tracks. But it is very well done, and it has a greater longevity than the majority of albums that come out in this genre.

August Rush (4/10)

Welcome to the biggest disappointment of 2007, for me. We all develop expectations for movies based on their previews and advertisements, as well as the hype that the media brings to it. In this case, the practical version of this movie did not hold a candle to the theoretical version my mind had created.

Two young musicians meet unexpectedly and seem to fall in love, having sex on the first night. They never see each other again, the boy going on to tour with his over-pretentious cock-rock band, and the girl pursuing her virtuosic ability behind a cello. The girl is pregnant, and wants to have the baby, but her father disapproves. Late in the pregnancy, she is in a wreck and there is an emergency delivery. The father forges her signature on a form to put the baby up for adoption, and tells her the baby is lost. She abandons cello and becomes a music teacher. Meanwhile, the boy abandons his band and becomes an investor of some kind.

Alongside this story, we see the life of a young boy named Evan who longs for his parents. He is in love with music and hears it in everything, but he doesn't know how to play it or make others hear it. He runs away from his orphanage, and finds himself homeless in New York City, where he meets a young boy that takes him in. The boy is part of a group of homeless kids that play music on the street for money, led by Robin Williams, an insane person. The kids work for money, which they give to him, in exchange for a place to stay and work on their music. Here, Evan first touches a guitar, and is immediately incredible at it. The rest is a story of a kid who believes that he can find his parents if they can just hear him.

It's a chick flick that for some reason assumes it's audience has the collective mind of a five year old. Full of cliches, full of pretense, lacking in all substance and originality, and worse than that: it professes to love music, and then mocks it without restraint for the entire length of the movie. They make no attempt to make any of the several musicians in the movie look as though they are actually playing the music you hear. Evan's father, who dresses like a 90's punk kid but plays in a band comparable to Nickleback, spews pretension and sappy romance I-talk-to-the-Moon-and-it-talks-back nonsense to seduce the beautiful cellist, whose performance was actually the only decent one in the movie.

Bottom line: The premise for the movie is excellent and made me desperate to see it. But the writing is horrendous, ignorant, and cliche, the music lacks creativity, the acting is weak. From a movie that professes a love for music, you expect a unique and beautiful sonic experience, but you get an unrealistic, pretentious chick flick.

Emmure- Goodbye To The Gallows (3/10)

Look out everyone, it's Emmure's crushing Victory Records debut- a ten song mosh fest concept album about (drumroll please...) a guy whose girlfriend dumped him! Man, I remember when my girlfriend dumped me, and listening to this album just brought all those old feelings back. It's powerful dude, I just moshed my little body all over my room for like forty minutes!

Alright, let's get this over with. This cd is a joke. It opens with a breakdown, closes with a breakdown, and the middle is all breakdowns (minus one hilarious allusion to disturbed) and a 4 second "tech" chromatic run.

On top of that, the lyrics are pathetic. It literally is a concept album about a guy and a girl breaking up. The guy is really upset for nine songs, and on the tenth, he kills himself! That's gotta suck!

Moving on, obviously, being a mosh band, the musicianship isn't very impressive. The drummer has some pretty complex kick parts, and he seems to be fairly fast, but it's nothing to dwell on really. I feel very certain that you can judge the caliber of a musician by not just the technical complexity of his parts, but also the quality and creativity of the music being played, and in that respect, you really can't call these guys musicians. They're just dudes in a band.

The vocalist provides the only redeeming points on this record, because his voice is monstrous (albeit with an enormous amount of voice distortion) and he is very versatile as far as style. He has a large screaming range, he talks, he yells, he sings, and each are done well and are pretty memorable, despite the idiocy of the words being sung.

Production-wise it's a Victory Release. Triggered drums, crushing guitar that never leaves the gain below 10.9, and some bass drops and post production effects to tie up the package. There's no creative tracks or really anything about this album that expressly sets them apart at all from anyone, and it's no surprise. I don't know if you've heard of them or not, but this band is doing very well already by playing what kids want to hear. People don't want to take music seriously. It's all a big joke.