generic breakdown, blast beat, breakdown, blast beat
Signal the Firing
Squad definitely impressed me with their first album
Earth Harvest but after hearing
Abnegate it was very disappointing. They still have plenty of potential but they just did not climb to expectations on this record.
There is not anything they did that was very bad but the whole album is just really boring. I will say one of the things that really started to piss me off at a point was how many breakdowns they crammed into
Abnegate. Breakdowns have already started to get old and when people over use them it is just miserable. The first track on the album does a great job of using as many fucking breakdowns as possible and it is one of the worst songs on the album which is a really terrible first impression. It does start to get a little bit better but not by a substantial amount. This album just has some decent growling vocals,(sort of like
Carnifex) really low tuned guitars, and an excessive amount of breakdowns and blast beats. It occasionally has some catchy riffs and some cool atmospheric synth parts. Well onto the drums.
The drums were actually one of the better parts of the album. Like I said, it includes a lot of blast beats and one thing that helps this not be as boring is the fact that the drummer at least knows how to do them right. He also has a pretty fast double kick and the snare sounds really good in my opinion. I really feel like if this band had a bad drummer than they would not even have a listenable album.
The vocals were pretty good but they are not mind blowing or that much different from your average deathcore band. His highs sound a lot like Scott Lewis from
Carnifex. He also does a yell thing that adds a little more variety to them and it actually sounds decent. So the vocals were never a disappointing factor. This being said, I still way prefer the old vocalist.
The guitars are toned just a little too low and I can not stress enough how much they breakdown. It just pretty much ruined this record for me. Every song has a breakdown and none of them are that different either. I feel like I am listening to the same song on repeat because of it. I can not pin point more than one or two standout songs because of this. The chugging from how low they are tuned is just annoying as hell. The outro track is straight breakdown from start to finish and they only reason it was not a total disaster was because of the cool synth in it.
Well from what you have read so far, I am sure you can tell that this album will not have to many plays from me. It fails to break any limits or do anything to carry the deathcore genre. It is a record that will probably give people more of a reason to call deathcore garbage. I would only recommend this album to the die hard deathcore fans out there. Other than that, it is not worth spending money or wasting time downloading. It actually took me a quite a while to find a place to download it which annoys me even more. So I would have to say this album gets a 11/20.
The video below is from their previous 2010 release,
Earth Harvest. Which is actually a much better record in my opinion.
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