Liste der Bands Metalcore Reflections Of Ruin (AUS) Rebirth

Rebirth shows a lot of potential, there’s a lot of good song writing on display here, the vocals are good and the musicianship is generally excellent. The problem with Rebirth is the dependency on breakdowns, when you have music that’s like this then the breakdowns only serve to falter the flow of the songs. It halts momentum; it doesn’t fit in with rest of the music. Without them this would be a hyper melodious death metal release, and it would be so much better.

I’ve never understood breakdowns; I simply just can’t appreciate them for the life of me. When a band has got some good momentum going for them why would they want to halt it by playing a mind numbing breakdown that doesn’t fit in in the context of the music? It perplexes me to no end. Although in the rare times, I can agree a breakdown does occasionally work (Note: The Contortionist and The Faceless know how to use them). Rebirth however feels disjointed, the music is highly melodic and technical and the breakdowns halt whatever momentum they had going.

It’s a real shame that the music was let down in this way, the music in itself is exceptionally well written. It’s highly melodic, fairly complex and progressive and it’s fun to listen to. There’s a lot of excellent ideas that would have worked really rather well but there’s too much breakdowns. Even the introductory track starts with a breakdown which isn’t a good thing. Starting a song with a breakdown causes me to lose attention and at this point I wasn’t looking forward to the rest of the E.P.

Thankfully the next song starts off with a really good and hyper melodic riff, there’s some pretty excellent guitar work on here that is unfortunately broken apart by mindless chugging sections. The vocal work is excellent, ranging from some powerful gutturals to higher pitched screaming, it works well in conjunction with the music. This guy is certainly one of the better metalcore vocalists, being able to do some really aggressive harsh vocals that are heads and shoulders above other vocalists in the genre.

Rebirth is a really difficult album to form a strong opinion on, there are some excellent melodic death metal sections with some powerful vocals and technically intricate riffs. But then again the album is hampered down by the use of breakdowns, I counted 4 in the first track. 4 FUCKING BREAKDOWNS. It pisses me off to no end that the band is dependent on the standard metalcore tropes when in general the music is so much more than what the genre should be. There’s so much potential on Rebirth that it’s disheartening to see them really on breakdowns so much. It feels like they’re not confident enough with their song writing abilities and just add breakdowns whenever they run out of ideas. In the third track however there is a breakdown that does work well, it’s got a nice sparkling clean lead over the palm muted riffs with some really low gutturals thrown in. It’s followed by one of the catchiest riffs on Rebirth and shows that when they aren’t content to fulfill all of metalcores stereotypes then they’re easily capable of creating some fantastic melodic death metal.

There’s a lot of praise I could lavish upon Rebirth, the leads are excellent, the vocals are good, there’s some nice clean leads as well to add soothing ambiance and melody to Rebirth. It’s really melodic and intricate and there are a lot of excellent ideas. There’s a pretty cool science fiction vibe to this album starting from the excellent cover art all the way down to the music. The fourth track in particular has a pretty nice futuristic clean lead to it that adds a cool level of spacey ambiance to the song. In particular each song has a sort of cosmic feel to it (when they’re churning out melodeath in favor of the standard breakdown stuff); at times it feels like a metalcore version of the band Fractal Gates with the spacey feel to the music and the subdued progressive elements. There’s definitely more going on here in Rebirth than most standard metalcore, however when the amounts of breakdowns in each track averages about 3-4 then whatever potential on display here is sadly broken apart by the addition of said breakdowns. It really angers me that the band resorts to filling the songs with so many breakdowns, the music is excellent, full of some astounding riffs and melodies, it should NOT be ruined like this. The breakdowns ruin the flow of the album, Rebirth would be almost flawless without them.

Considering Rebirth is only an E.P then most of the flaws are excusable, hopefully by the time they release a full length the band would have addressed the issues I have with Rebirth. For what it’s worth I like Rebirth; I definitely think a decrease in the number of breakdowns will go along way in increasing the quality of their music. There’s a lot of potential on display here and there’s some really excellent sections to the music, but I just don’t feel like they’ve done all they could have done. They’re clearly very technically proficient musicians and the lead work definitely proves this. If the band can detach itself from the fundamental stereotypes of modern metalcore and focus on the melodeath then they can be onto something really special.