End Of The Year Candidate: All That Remains - “The Fall Of Ideals”

All That Remains wants to have their cake and eat it too. With all the complaints of upstart bands looking to rip off other melodic metalcore bands with sing-along-song style choruses, and certain genre leader beginning to stagnate, All That Remains has chosen to experiment with certain parts of their sound, making some very good integrations.

Perhaps because All That Remains is behind many other popular bands such as Killswitch Engage, Shadows Fall and God Forbid in terms of popularity and record sales, they’ve made a conscious choice not to compete directly with those bands, but instead to create a signature sound that might very well outlast those bands beyond current trends.

The melodic metalcore presented of “The Fall Of Ideals” contains some the catchiest sing-along-song style choruses that All That Remains has done. At the same time, some songs are an experiment with death metal, with tremolo picked riffs, low grunts and blast beats.

Philip Labonte really makes his voice the star of the show with a showcase of his vocal range. Clean singing ranges from crystal clear crooning to a dirty rock tone. His hardcore bark ranges from the mid-range to some highs never seen before on their previous effort “This Darkened Heart”. A modulation in his voice gives a much more black metal style rasp at time, and as said before, there are the very low death grunts.

The bulk of the music itself is built around guitar melodies and harmonies, and while many people point to Europe as inspiration, All That Remains is growing slowly away from European inspired melodies. In most of the songs, to take a break from the quick action the listener is presented with a short focal point on a sombre harmony and often a beautiful guitar solo as well. Worked into the music in subtle ways are bits and pieces of clean guitars and acoustics. There are also the standard “chugga chugga” style breakdowns, but they’re worked in as essential parts of the songs, so at-home listeners won’t be bothered much by such a musical object created for the live setting.

There are drawbacks to “The Fall Of Ideals” though. The first half of the songs are very well done journeys to the sing-along choruses, but they contain very little of the heavy experimentation seen on the other half of the album. The songs on the first half also tend to follow pretty a standard verse/chorus format as well, with the last half of the songs getting some of the more creative, and in a sense better arrangements. The songs also tend to hang between three and four minutes, coupled with some of the standard verse/chorus formats, this takes away from some of the depth in the songs, as well as some of the poor choices for song endings. By the time the tenth or eleventh song rolls around, the album feels like it should have been finished. The lyrics also present a problem as well. A song or two about personal strength, perseverance through adversity is fine, but having most of the alums lyrics focussed around that subject matter comes off as bit a bit egotistical. There’s also a relationship song or two as well, and to be honest, relationships have been covered enough by popular recording artists. All these things drawbacks pull my rating from a 9 out of 10 to an 8 instead.

If All That Remains can further integrate their heavier experimentations into a whole cohesive album, and use them more often for their next outing, my prediction is that they’ll be able to outlast any trend.

8/10

All That Remains
All That Remains At Prosthetic Records