Album review: The Fall Of Troy – In The Unlikely Event

Maybe it’s just something to do with perspective, but it feels like all the most interesting albums of the year are suddenly emerging as we draw into its last few months. The Fall Of Troy are not a new band (though they’re new to me), with their self-titled debut having appeared back in 2003, but if their new offering In The Unlikely Event is anything to go by, I suspect we’ll be hearing much more of them in the years to come.

My immediate impression was that they reminded me a little bit of Protest The Hero, which is fitting, given their youth and their progressive approach to post-hardcore. There’s a sort of manic wide-eyed vibe right from the outset (which is surely only fitting for a song titled “Panic Attack!”) – but there’s also the straight-faced bombast of Coheed & Cambria at their best, the mangled guitar treatments of prog outliers like Oceansize, the frantic random note-spatters of the post-hardcore set… there’s a little bit of everything, in other words, up to and including some slim passages of pure metal and hardcore brutalism. You can’t rest easy while listening to In The Unlikely Event; it’ll catch you napping and swipe you upside the head without so much as a warning. Buzzing synth bass and jazzy clean guitars rub shoulders with virtuoso shredding, pitchbent whammy-pedal weirdness (“Dirty Pillow Talk”), mathrock melodic abstractions and brief flashes of pure unalloyed pop (“Nobody’s Perfect”); the gaps between songs are so tiny as to seem like little more than a grace note of silence in one long and baffling musical narrative.

The downside of this quick-change aesthetic is that it’s very hard to get into it; I fully suspect that it’s the sort of album that grows on you with time, repeated listens revealing yet more rewards for the patient and curious explorer, but The Fall Of Troy have no care for the potential alienation of the listener who just can’t deal with the completely fragmented song structures and stylistic incoherence. There’s a grand pattern lurking in the architecture, like the skeleton of utility lines informing the sprawl of some emergent favela when viewed from above, but it’s not easy to get perspective when you’re stood in the middle of a crowded market street being assailed by a panoply of new and unexpected sounds and rhythms. The adventurous will love the thrill of the unexpected; the more conservative will head swiftly back to more familiar and predictable territories.

Regular readers will doubtless have guessed that I’ve quite enjoyed In The Unlikely Event, but there’s one rather serious sticking point that prevents me from going head over heels for The Fall Of Troy… and it’s frontman Thomas Erak’s voice, which veers from preppy emo drama into hair-metal pastiche, by way of a whole bunch of other momentary extremes. Don’t get me wrong, I like the lyrics well enough, and the melodies are fine too – it’s the guy’s tone I don’t get on with, and that’s just the way it works sometimes. It’s rare that I find a vocalist’s screams and roars to be the most palatable aspect of their performance, but that’s the case here; something about it just grates on me.

But one man’s meat is another man’s poison, and I’d recommend any fan of progressive post-hardcore who hasn’t already discovered The Fall Of Troy (which I fully expect is a very short list, possibly consisting of myself alone) to give them a listen. In The Unlikely Event is a staggering work of composition and performance for any band, and even more so for one so young.