Album Review

Breaking The Day – Survived By None

• 6th Jul 2011

The pacing and flow of an album can be one of the biggest obstacles for a band moving from an EP to a full-length player. It’s been some time since Breaking The Day’s first EP and ‘Survived By None’ proves they have been busy creating a monster.

The intro and subsequent song ‘The Streets With Rain With Blood Tonight’ is Breaking The Day destroying your mental city like some sludge Godzilla. This is an album in no hurry to pick you apart; it’s a considered dissection, which serves only to make it even more effective.

It’s when BTD bed themselves down into a groove on ‘Leave A Blanket Of Ash On The Ground’ that they show real ability to control the pace and weight of a riff through pure intensity.
With its guitar death knell ‘Hours (Broken Clocks)’ is just an excellent piece of writing that grinds alongside black metal and sludge sounds, to do what should happen when two musical styles collide: become something new and interesting.

With experimentation and new ideas it can be easy to forget the base at which you started, the guitar sound at the beginning of ‘Pretty Girls Make Graves’ reminds you that BTD have not forgotten, Matt and Aaron creating the heavy sound of bones being shook from your body.

For every refinement there is invention, tracks like ‘The Boy Who Escaped The Wolves’ – with its whispering vocals drawing you ever closer, dissolving into ‘Nightmare Dependencies’ instrumental, and ‘Till Death’s fall into the final outro perfectly wrapping the album up like some dark present filled with complex sides of human nature.

It’s ‘Pretty Girls Make Graves‘ sawing-at-your-nerves riff, its movement into clean lines and subsequent return to its heavy centre that succeeds where many fail, to add another dimension to their inherent sound.

The interplay of screaming and growling Jay creates within ‘A Murder Of Crows’, coiling itself around the main theme, is both confident and entirely in keeping with the pace of an album slowly building it’s ideas.  

Breaking the day have gone away and worked at what they do to refine, polarise and challenge their sound, ‘’Survived By None’ is them achieving it.