August Burns Red
Messengers

"Metalcore is only for fourteen-year-old posers"

If you really think that, there are two possibilities: you're either true "True Metallers" and everything that isn't Manowar is crap to you (for the record, I love Manowar, eh), or you've simply never listened to "August burn red". So, enough with the nonsense, let's try to change your mind.

Let's start by saying that "August Burns Red" is a highly technical band, but they never devolve into the cold, desolate, and boring lands of virtuosity for its own sake (do you know something about that, Persefone? They're an amazing band too, anyway). The band offers us metalcore (what? Highly technical metalcore?... yes, highly technical metalcore) with strong thrash and death influences, with constant tempo changes and, listen up, "breakdowns", which, it should be said, have never been so well integrated into the song structure of a track as in this case, without falling into the tacky or filler just to bring the song to a standard runtime. The album hits like a pure rage storm, which will delight the younger metallers, but it hides a sophisticated vein, almost prog I dare say, in the compositions, which rarely have the classic "verse-chorus-verse" structure, instead opting for a more sophisticated structure that rarely repeats the same riff more than twice.

Talking about the album track by track seems pointless to me; there are so many memorable moments that I'll just mention those that are most significant to me. For example, in "Up Against the Ropes," there's a spectacular tempo change around the second minute that is something spectacular, or the fantastic double bass drum run in "The Balance," or again the sublime melodic break in "Redemption". There are really many moments that will make you say, "Do these guys really play the same genre as Asking Alexandria?" The only downside of the album, in my opinion, is a too homogeneous tracklist that more than once might make you not notice the track change.

In short, this is an album worth listening to even at the cost of being called posers.