So: another day, another metallic hardcore album. This time it’s A Will Of Fire by Glaswegian quintet Azriel; being signed to the same label as last winter’s flavour-of-the-season Gallows, they’ve got a lot of hype and expectation to live up to.
Well, let’s clear the initial worries off the table first – with A Will Of Fire, metallic hardcore is thankfully not a convenient synonym for “slightly beefier emo-pop”. On the contrary – here Azriel deploy the scraping metal chords and harmonised lead hooks that the Stateside figureheads of metalcore are prone to use, but seasoned with a slightly more approachable edge thanks to the clean solo tones riding on top of the crunch.
Did I say approachable? Well, yeah … but just when you’re in the midst of approaching, frontman David Murray will start doing his angry-bear bellowing thing (accompanied by xNYHCx street-chant choruses from his bandmates), and suddenly you’re not quite so sure you want to say hello after all. But then Azriel pick up the pace with double-time snares back on the drumkit, the dual guitar attack starts up again, and suddenly it’s like Agnostic Front covering Dragonforce. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
A Will Of Fire doesn’t leave you many chances to get bored. Changes of pace and time signature crop up regularly, and the mid-range moves from epic chord progressions and stately harmony to angular Neanderthal chugging and fretboard fetishism, via pretty much everything in between. In fact, the only reliable constant to Azriel’s songwriting is Murray’s vocals, which aren’t so much bad as rather samey – it would be nice to get some variety in here, y’know, maybe a smidgen of actual singing, some clear spoken word to break things up a bit?
But it’s a credit to Azriel that I’m not sure they’d work as well with different vocals. Despite the obvious disparity of the elements they’re adding together – the push-pull contrast of the bright lead melodics and the metal chord-work especially – they have that essential thing that lesser bands lack: a coherent and believable sound of their own.
Indeed, apart for the vocals (which are a matter of personal preference; I’m just as tired of shouty bands as much as I am of pitch-corrected pop-punk), the only thing I can really find to fault about A Will Of Fire would be the lacklustre production, and considering it’s a début full-length on an independent label from a young UK band in a fairly marginal market niche, I think that can be forgiven. The songs are there, and that’s what counts – Azriel have the skills to go the distance. Now all they need is the luck.
And just as a side note, that’s one of the most visually striking album covers I’ve seen so far this year. Nice work.
Related articles:
Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: A Will Of Fire, Azriel, hardcore, metal, metalcore
