Fight Your Evil Side, by To Leave a Trace
Instead of creating a Friday Playlist, I decided to see if I could find someone else’s playlist to highlight. Instead I checked out the featured artist for today, the aforementioned Fight Your Evil Side. Here are my thoughts.
First impressions: Before I even hit “play”, I was impressed by the album art. It looks professionally done, and is kind of neat. It features some demon-skeleton-type things from the ground pulling what I guess is an angelic figure by the leg. The tags for this album are: “rock, emocore, alternative, screamo, metalcore”. So already I’m picturing a less refined Alexisonfire.
Actual impressions: Screamo is definitely the most appropriate tag for this group – not my favourite genre of music, but the instrumentation behind it is really good. I appreciated the quieter moments of this Ukraine group when the singer actually sang “properly”. Going back to my first impressions, they do remind me quite a bit of Alexisonfire, my only previous experience in screamo listening.
There are some quieter songs too, that aren’t full of screaming. I appreciate these ones a lot more, because it’s easier to listen to (for me, anyway). Did I mention I don’t generally enjoy screamo?
The thing about this kind of music is I don’t know what they’re singing about, so I’m not sure if there are any messages in the songs beyond reading into the titles of the songs. And in this case, I don’t glean too much from them.
Overall: If you can get past the screaming, or if you enjoy the screaming, you’ll find a band that is quite talented and sound really good.
Alternative Airwaves 