Album review: All Shall Perish - Awaken The Dreamers

You don’t name your band All Shall Perish unless you’re willing to live up to it, I guess, and Awaken The Dreamers - the band’s third full-length - won’t disappoint fans of the more technical wing of the deathcore sound.

All Shall Perish have a cleaner, faster sound than a lot of the acts lumped under that admittedly loose definition, with the focus on Meshuggah-like intricacy and high precision time signature work. By contrast to the relentless attack of the Swedes, however, Awaken The Dreamers has more variation of tempo and tone, ranging from the insanely fast to the almost funereal.

They make an effort to balance things out, though; when the drums are at a widely-spaced snail’s pace, the guitars take on the burden of detail as All Shall Perish shift into full-on fretboard wizardry, while the more frenzied drumming is accompanied by simple staccato riffs and grinds. Unusually for such a heavy album, Awaken The Dreamers has a lot of space in the mix, and it definitely does the music good to have room to breathe.

The listener is kept on their toes by the shifting styles. Title track “Awaken The Dreamers”, for example, comes complete with a soaring epic section that’s very reminiscent of the currently in-vogue Gothenberg sound, with layers of clean vocals soaring over intricate half-pace lead lines and a metronomic blatter from the kick drum. All Shall Perish move next to the moody haunting feel of “Memories Of A Glass Sanctuary”, a requiem for some regretted ritual or another, before flipping back in the other direction with the furious assault of “Stabbing To Purge Dissimulation”.

The latter song features the lyric “fucking soulless machines will rip you apart“, and that’s about as accurate a summary of Awaken The Dreamers as you could wish for - cheery heroics and escapism, this ain’t. That said, it’s refreshing to hear that All Shall Perish lean toward a more psychological bleakness and nihilism than the blood’n'demons clichés that many of their contemporaries seem unable to leave behind.

That said, I doubt many people listen to this stuff for the lyrics - and those that do are the sort who always get their own seat on public transport, if you know what I mean. No - you listen to bands like All Shall Perish for the musicianship and power of the sound, and on that level Awaken The Dreamers doesn’t disappoint, representing an absolute mastery of the possibilities presented by the traditional instrument selection of metal bands. All Shall Perish aren’t going to storm the mainstream any time soon, but their skill level and unique sound should ensure them a longevity that many other deathcore bands will fail to achieve.

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