Gone Without Trace--s/t
You'd think the band would be named "Gone Without A Trace." The lack of that "A" really bothers me.
Packaging--
The good:
I'm not entirely sure what the cover is...there appears to be a cloudy sky on the top, but the bottom 3/4 looks, to me, like the frayed end of a blanket. Could this be an ant's view of the sky from below the band's last picnic? Pretty simple layout inside...thanks yous and lyrics with some small photos. Pretty standard. Not bad.
The bad:
The artwork, while not bad, isn't terribly special either. The lyrics are presented as a paragraph instead of line by line...this makes following along a bit difficult though they do include "/" between each line barked, so that helps. With limited space, this is okay.
The music:
The good:
I hear a bit of Coalesce in this. This isn't bad, but it also doesn't really jump out at me either. These young men just sound so angry...and they're from Orange County. What is there to be pissed about living there? It's like Vision of Disorder...did you see the guitar player's house in the NYHC Documentary? That looked like my parents' house. I'm not pissed. In fact I'm quite content.
Maybe living around a bunch of hot, year round, scantily clad ladies who shoot you down a lot makes one pissed? That may be it. Or perhaps they're charging more for soymilk in lattes now...those Starbuckstards.
Anyway, we've got some nice, solid metalcore here. No shitty singing. No half assed, poorly done metal. This band knows what it does and it sticks with it.
Basically, this has got some very cool chugging, some well executed drumming, some solid barking, and overall decent songwriting. That's basically what seperates great metalcore from the bad...the execution (done very well here) and the songwriting (which is okay).
The bad--
I don't know if the songs are really memorable. I've listened to this a bunch of times and it's not really sticking. In fact, I'd go as far as to say the songs blend together...I don't know what track I'm on...I would've guessed two or three, and I'm on track 9.
I'm realizing, in my old age, that metalcore doesn't really do it for me...so I can't rant and rave, but it's good. Nice and heavy, the way hardcore should be. This band seems like they're young, so I'd have to say it's a good job and with some refinement and better writing, we'd have a force to be reckoned with. The only other gripe is the vocals get a bit redundant. One style bark throughout, which works fine if the songs are amazing (check out Walls of Jericho's second record to hear what I mean), but since what we have here is pretty average in the song department, I would've liked something to make this stick out.
Recap�
Metalcore done right, finally. Also, I don't really know much about Orange County so don't e-mail me telling me about how tough it is living there...there are tough parts of my town too. Sure I don't live there, but they're there...there's this place down the road where the houses only cost $400,000. Can you believe that? I'm scared to drive through that ghetto at night.
Want more info?
Gone Without Trace's website
Review by Chris