Album Review

The Empire Shall Fall – Awaken

• 22nd Sep 2010

The Empire Shall Fall is everything metalcore should be. Load, motivated and kinetic in the extreme. Their new album, available from the band’s website, is a head bangers dream this offering is a record which is easily greater than the sum of its parts.

Some albums have little energy and quickly fall away, going on a defensive footing, there is no such problem with this record as they maintain their offence with more purpose than attacks from tanks. Sounding much like an assault from a heavily armoured division as they pound lines out with their tougher than armour licks and drums combining thundering away in the background, the anti-war and vaguely anti-capitalist screeching pummels through from lead singer Leach.

The title track Awaken, is a flag waving anthem spewing out to please the masses with poppy hooks about how the system is the enemy along with apathy, stirring the very soul of rebellion. You can imagine what happens next with Lords of War, sounding like a Valhalla smelly and sweaty with a fire which can only be described as inextinguishable.

Standout track, Voices Forming Weapons is again a broth of war cry “Upraise in our defiance/This is an unseen war of words” and is rather like a formulaic battle plan which could be used on anything from video games to the next Hollywood ground shaker. There are other good tracks, but they melt and mould together forming the album’s backbone of a pity against war “As the ashes clear we saw the images of a city in ruins/Countless people displaced and broken/And where hope once stood/Now fear and hysteria”. An apt soundtrack to the work of say, Robert Capa, Don McCullion and James Natchway in the befittingly titled City of Angels.

The message, though courageous, is for listeners who are yet to refine their political biases. Not the most sophisticated of records following a seemingly method rather than a spirit of sophisticated bias. If they were at a demonstration you would expect them to be at the front, waving the placards, but not giving the speeches of ideological fervour.