War Of Ages – Pride of the Wicked

Every once in a while for the past few months I’d hear about this band until finally one day I decided to check them out, since Facedown has a pretty good tendency to release music by bands I grow to enjoy. Although my exploration of their music was very brief, it gave me a pretty good idea of what they sound like and a new album to look forward to. But now that I have possession of this cd, I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t listen to them before this release. It sounds great, it just seems like a perfect blend of everything I love about the music I listen to. The songs blend ripping guitar solos and incredible lead guitar riffs, a fairly harsh yell with great back-up chanting, rapid drumming, and good bass lines playing along. This bands pretty much got it all, although at times it felt a little chuggy and painful. But the songs make up for it when they pick up. I can only imagine what a crowd would be doing during the breakdowns this band plays though, it would probably involve dancing or thrashing around. The music just feels like it was put together very carefully, everything blends perfectly. This is easily one of the more impressive cd’s that I’ve heard lately. I’m at a loss about who it should be compared to though. They sound somewhat like A Perfect Murder, except with less palm mute in their songs(that’s when a guitarist leaves part of his hand on his guiatar strings to keep the strings from ringing, everyone reading this has heard it just in case you’re not sure what I’m talking about). I think it’s only fair that I praise the guiarists a bit more, each song has lead guitar riffs that impressed me every time I heard them. It was kind of like putting a solo into an entire song, until he breaks into a solo and you realize the difference. Simply astounding to listen to. I really can’t pick out much I disliked about this cd, it just about rests on the breakdowns getting too drawn out and slow.

Tonight I wrote a few other reviews, one of which was Misery Signals(Mirrors) and I said that this year it’s been one of my favorites. This album is one of the contenders for that position, it’s amazing that for months there’s only pretty good cd’s coming out, then in the span of a week or two you can hear half a dozen cd’s that completely blow you away. I think that fans of metal and “metal-core” would probably appreciate this album, and no matter how much I detest the word metal-core, I’ll probably have to accept that its slowly becoming an accepted term. Even though it’s usually just hardcore guys that don’t have the balls to call their band metal and accept the fact that they are incapable of sounding like Gorilla Biscuits. But I digress, this is a great album, try to get a hold of it and just hope that you don’t have a problem finding anything released by Facedown in cd stores where you live, I know I do.