Call To Preserve – From Isolation

It has been a while since I’ve listened to this band. I remembered reviewing one of their CD’s what seems like a lifetime ago, a time when I was young and impressionable. Curious of how I felt so long ago, I pulled up my old review fearing the worst. I had a horrible habit of dumping lavish praise on any band that played in drop d and had a drummer that could use a double kick pedal on his bass drum. My fears were instantly defused when I saw that my feelings then were exactly the same as they are now.

Don’t let the first few sentences of this thing put you off; Call To Preserve isn’t all that bad. Their brand of hardcore is more or less a cross between Trial and Terror. The music itself is quite heavy with some various melodic parts scattered throughout different songs. There are a few very painful breakdowns, like a constant open E as the drummer wails away at his double kick and cymbals. When the vocalist isn’t trying to sound like Scott Vogel, he does a good job of sounding like the guy from Trial (which is good, Trial is awesome). The gang vocals on this record are almost identical to what I’ve heard on a Terrorrecord, it’s almost as if the band abducted Terror’s gang-vocal participants and forced them to do them again.

For the most part, this music is fast paced, straight-forward, heavy hardcore. It sounds great in the songs where they avoid breakdowns (or at least use them sparsely) and a vocal delivery using a hip-hop cadence. The lyrics have a lot of different topics, but as one would expect from a band called “Call To Preserve,” straight edge is an important topic. So just a warning for all you “I hate straight edge people because my friends sister told me they fight people for smoking and drinking” this band uses edge lyrics quite often. You may now be outraged that bands have so heavily written about being edge. Anyways, perhaps it’s time to move on before my writing degrades into a tirade about how I hate when people lump every straight-edge person into the vile criminal type group just because of a few violent meat-heads.

Call To Preserve is probably on the top of the pile of recent heavy, mosh-oriented hardcore bands for me. They have a ton of potential to put out even better music and they’ve definitely improved a great deal since their last record. So, hopefully, they will continue to not break up and I will eagerly await their next album where just maybe they’ll take a cue from me (and hopefully others) and cut out some of the breakdowns. Until that time, I’ll keep my fingers crossed and give this CD a listen every once in a while. I would suggest you do the same.