The Hope Conspiracy – Death Knows Your Name

For the most part this year, cd’s have been either very good or very bad(I have numerous examples of both). But, not many have been in the middle for me yet. The Hope Conspiracy happened to be one of those middle bands for me this year. They sound good, but their cd just didn’t arouse as much interest in me as I would have hoped. It seemed to give me the same feeling that I got from Modern Life is War, in that the songs all felt like one long outro. Although it began to shed this feeling after the first few songs, I could always feel it in the background of the music. I did like the vocals quite a bit, and when the songs pick up, the music becomes enjoyable. It’s just that they don’t start off as fast as I prefer. Now I just skip over the first two songs to solve that problem. I’m not really sure how other people felt about this cd, I didn’t give it to any of my friends to listen to and I haven’t read anything that anyone else wrote about it, but I found that it was having trouble holding my attention. Although not many albums can actually do that(most often I get about 3/4 through or listen to my favorite songs). I liked the lyrics quite a bit, I read through them, and it seemed like these guys put a lot of thought into them.

I’m not really sure whether or not this album will grow on me, it’s a different style of music than what I usually listen to. That might draw me to listen to it more often, but it also might push me away, I guess I’ll find out one of these days. The album wasn’t that bad though, so it definitely would not hurt to check out. I’ve got a feeling Modern Life is War fans would love this. I felt some similarities between the two. It’s also nice to know Victory Records isn’t the only label releasing music this year. Or should I say, it’s nice to know labels(such as my beloved Deathwish Records) are releasing music to compete with Victory re-releasing every cd in their archive. But I digress, I know I’m going to do some digging and get a hold of some more of this bands music, I suggest that anyone reading this who has an interest in hardcore do the same.