Botch – We Are The Romans

Lets get this out of the way now, if you consider yourself a metal head, or enjoy metal in any shape or form and have yet to hear this album. Get out. Seriously. Go home, look yourself in the mirror and weep for your lack of humanity. This album is better then you, your shitty metalcore band you started with your shitty metalcore friends, your favourite shitty metalcore bands and your mother’s vagina. Now, I might be coming off as biased, but I mean it. If not for this album I wouldn’t even be listening to this type of music.

In the course of 10 tracks, Botch rarely pulls any punches. Within the first 3 seconds of the first song To Our Friends In The Great White North, they already state their intentions of destroying you for the next 40 some odd minutes. It’s beautiful. Everything swirls together in chaotic harmony, but it’s anchor is apparent: Dave Knudson’s creative ahead-of-it’s-genre guitar work. He manages to make each song memorable in it’s own way, whether it be the spiralling downward scale played on the above track, the interlude in the middle of C. Thomas Howell As The -Soul Man-, or even the incorporation of the “Chaos pad” (Casio keyboard) in Transitions From Persona To Object. It’s hard not to feel invincible listening to this. Not to say that this album isn’t without its softer moments. The track Swimming The Channel vs. Driving The Chunnel seems like one of the album’s only reprieves, before throwing you back into the fray of distortion.

We Are The Romans contains very few flaws, but one of the bigger ones is the bass is practically inaudible most of the time, being drowned under the waves of guitar frenzy, even the vocals at times takes a backdrop, however the drumming is absolutely top notch. All of this comes to a head at the albums centrepiece, it’s 9th track Man The Ramparts. The song starts off menacingly and brooding, as it continues to chug and build upon itself until it falls apart. However it’s soon picked up again as choir chanting fills your speakers, which lead you to the final explosion of the album.

The last track is kind of weird. Its a strange, almost technoish kind of song with no vocals (not unlike Autorelocater by At The Drive-In, except that has vocals hidden in the background). Just a little jam track that still manages to be intriguing.

Botch created this masterpiece in 1999 and disbanded 3 years after in 2002, however their legacy has left a monumental impact on the metal(core) scene forever. Often considered “math-metal” for their off-kilter time signatures and frenzied playing, they’re one of the most imitated bands in its genre. Bands have utilized their groundwork as a launch pad for something just as exciting (take The Blood Brothers for example), or based entire careers on trying to achieve the same style as they have, not creating anything interesting or good with it (Norma Jean, I’m looking at you). To put it simply, Botch doesn’t sound like band a), b) or c), because those bands sound like Botch.

It’s not exactly perfect, but it’s just as close as I’ve ever come across.