Yesterdays Rising – Lightworker

To say I was excited about Yesterdays Rising‘s follow up to 2004’s When We Speak We Breathe EP would be a lie. Because, I really wasn’t looking forward to it. Although the EP received some good press, I couldn’t stand it and found it painful to listen to in full. So the news Lightworker didn’t really give me much anticipation and when I got a copy, it took me a while to finally play it. But when I did, I was pleasantly surprised to see the band has grown a bit and that the CD wasn’t half bad.

Now sure, Lightworker is by no means a masterpiece – they still have a long way before they are anyway near that. It isn’t life changing, but in fact, moderately generic for the most part. Their music is a mix of emo, metal and screamo with slightly whiny singing vocals and powerful screams scattered about. They follow the trend of the uprising emo movement very well, and I’m sure many scenesters will jump at the opportunity of getting the CD; but they still can’t escape the fact that nothing really distinguishes them from the masses musically. Hell, nothing on the songs themselves really separate them from other songs on the album and they tend to fall into a drone after a while with nothing new kicking in.

Despite all of that though, Yesterdays Rising does have one thing that makes them standout in the crowd. That thing is the lyrics. Take the acoustic track My Conscious Curiosity for example, which asks “What am I a part of? What makes one Dream? And what makes a person have intuitive passion for something? What gives us touch, and a sweet taste? Who warms out inner soul and what makes us break?“. Or even better, search the lyrics for Experience To Write or Let Us and they will easily blow you away.

Sure, Yesterdays Rising are by no means my favorite band out there, they are far from it. But still, Lightworker has given me some hopes in the band. The CD isn’t life changing or epic, its kind of generic; but they do have a few good songs which are able to be played over again – and the lyrics are just great.