Attack! Attack! – This Means War

Attack! Attack! has been at the receiving end in many of my reviews lately, so it’s about time I offer an explanation for my constant ragging.  In my eyes the band represents so much that has gone wrong in the hardcore community.  Combining generic levels of electronics with a steady grind of bulky, saturated guitars, the blanket, audibly irritating screams of frontman Caleb Shomo serve as the cherry on the top of an already puke-smeared chocolate Sunday.  They say good things come in threes, but as far as Attack! Attack!’s third – and most financially successful – record is concerned, This Means War is a forgettable collection of throw away tunes that hardly deserves the excessive new release posters that come plastered all over mall “lifestyle” novelty stores (*cough* Hot Topic).

Tuning into This Means War is an exercise in extending your current level of tolerance.  Like a kid poking his desk neighbour to the breaking point, sitting through Attack! Attack! means being inundated with testing levels of repetitive annoyance.  The best thing I can say about Shomo is that he is loud.  But when it comes to personality in hardcore, he is the everyman, plagued by directionless and tiresome screaming, snarling, and gnashing.  In the occasional decipherable moments listeners are left with forgettable and overdone drivel as seen in phrases like “Everything seems so far out of my reach” – feeding the image of the band as victims, framing This Means War as little more than a melodramatic opportunity to whine.  You heard this back in 2005 under countless other names (The Devil Wears Prada being the most obnoxious comparison), and it wasn’t worth your time then either.

Musically, the album suffers from a painful case of uncontrolled, poorly paced chorus-verse-chorus typicality.  From “The Betrayal” through the first six tracks each songs bleeds into one another.  A mere pause spaces out “The Reality” from “The Abduction,” and is token at best – the band demonstrating little attempt to differentiate their melodic choruses, or bestow meaning upon any of the particular vocal styles (grunts, roars, screams); It’s as if everything just happens in parallel.  Listeners lasting long enough to reach “The Motivation” will find themselves greeted with a soulless, 30-second piano interlude (not like that hasn’t been done before…), then it’s back to the status quo.  A jarring stop-n-go of screaming and clean words ensure that Shomo and his crew readily miss the mark.

Upon reaching conclusion with “The Eradication,” This Means War just ends, and like anything else on the album, it ends without consequence.  Even writing this review felt more like a tedious exercise in mining my brain (and online thesauruses) for an exhaustive list of synonyms than a significant analysis.  If Attack! Attack! hasn’t found something meaningful by this point, I doubt they ever will.  Don’t hold your breath.  I recently reviewed a debut by Falling In Reverse, and while it was undeniably terrible, it still had a hint of personality.  This Means War is just soulless.