The quality of Underoath’s records continues to skyrocket with time, so I’m assuming that the band themselves fall into the camp of “Bands that are way into growing up.” Ever since Saves the Day grew out their hair and announced that they were “just another rock band”—please!—it’s become clichéd to “leave emo behind”—Blink 182 released their serious record; Copeland went all Coldplay-slash-Radiohead; John Nolan left a then-peerless Taking Back Sunday to play piano with his sister; Brand New stopped whining and jumped on the quiet-loud dynamic (in their case, dynamo) bandwagon; Darryl Palumbo toned down the Jessica-Hopper-esque girl bashin’ and formed what is basically an Attractions cover group. Underoath make it seem original, though.
The group’s first three records, Act of Depression, Cries of the Past, and The Changing of Times, are essentially bad black metal at heart. It
doesn’t matter, because all but one original member of
UO is now departed. The one member happened to be Aaron Gillespie, the Phil Collins of
Xtian metalcore, singing and drumming so well at the same time that the word “extravaganza” is attached somehow to his job description. In 2004, the band recruited a bunch of new members, notably new lead
screamalist Spencer Chamberlain, and released They’re Only Chasing Safety. It was a big-
ol’ Dashboard-reminiscent, scream n’ whine dynamic festival of pop punk trying to be metal, and it sounded awesome, if somewhat, well, Christian, and therefore
maudlindramatic (“Look who’s
dyin’ now/Slit your wrists from sleeping with the girl next door” being a choice lyric). It was promising. It was fresh and smoothly incorporated electronics and a choir.
But the thing was that in 2006,
UO released Define the Great Line, and shattered any expectation that the listener of Chasing Safety might’
ve had in mind for it. Spencer had ditched the high-pitch for a new, Southern-metal inspired throaty swagger—and when I say Southern, I mean attitude and accent (e.g. the line “Wake up, wake up, wake up/This is not a test,” sung with a palpable
Panteradrawl). At the same time the riffs and vocal moved from
emo to metal, the amount of time the band’s members spent listening to ISIS must’
ve surely gone through the roof, as they packed numerous songs—among them the ethereal “Casting Such A Thin Shadow” and the breathtaking concluding moments of “In Regards To Myself”—with atmospheric picking and
reverb ala the post-Pelican-metal school.
It’s 2008, and
UO quietly released a record—the one in question here—that shatters the other two into one collective run-up to its own glory. Spencer has been taking voice lessons, and it shows, man—it shows. His growl is now fierce, terrifying, brutal, and capable of slipping back into the necessary hardcore histrionics on command, but overall just metal as fuck, without being in any way
clichéd. I’m impressed. It’s Spencer’s performance that makes me want to check out their live show so bad (which I’m doing on October 24
th in Worcester, MA). Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the rest of the band
hasn’t followed suit, though—Tim
MacTague,
et al., are in fine form (check out the sick riff about halfway through the first track), and Aaron’s vocals have a special bite. The lyrics are completely desperate, with hints of trouble in paradise—“Everything is leaving me wondering/I hate that I’m questioning your everything” being one of several pseudo-Agnostic sentences to feature. There’s a lot of post-apocalyptic imagery, working its way superbly into what I feel is the album’s standout track, the Zeppelin-
esque jam “Emergency Broadcast.”
It's not as though Lost is a perfect record. There are several messy vocal spots on Aaron's part, a few of which sound rather forcibly pitch-corrected (check out the dramatic "Still get us home!" line on the second-to-last track), and the whole record tapers off after the midway point. But, whereas the other major items in the
UO catalogue are better as collections of songs than as wholes, Lost in the Sound is exactly that—a great, unified powerhouse of a record that belongs to be mentioned in the same breath as Brand New’s The Devil and God and Thrice’s
Vheissu. If the next record they put out is as good in proportion to this as it is to their back catalogue, we're in for one amazing record.
