Boysetsfire
While A Nation Sleeps

The eager anticipation for the return of boysetsfire marked the first half of 2013 for me.

7 years have passed since the excellent last album that had closed a cycle difficult to replicate, with the band's breakup and reunion after only 4 years. A band that since 1997, the year that gem was released, "The Day The Sun Went Out," heavily influenced by Snapcase, had made its own genre, standing as a beacon in a landscape that was becoming increasingly dark, that of a certain Post-Hardcore threatened by trendy bands with cutting-edge looks and whiny voices alternating with tough-at-all-costs passages. The boysetsfire were different, rooted in an honest scene with a strong and tempered spirit, they perhaps embraced melody but also personalized and perfected a type of sound maintaining an admirable attitude throughout their career, as they have never failed to demonstrate with interviews and live performances, but above all with grand, angry, and politicized lyrics.

7 years, as I was saying, and I'll say more: "While A Nation Sleeps" sounds as if the long pause never happened, Nathan Grey's band still has something to shout to the world, and this work proves it very well with furious and heartfelt tracks like the initial and explosive "Until Nothing Remains," "Heads Will Roll," and the splendid "Altar Of God."

The 13 tracks of the album are bound together by an audio sample that provides a narrative thread to the whole work, Charlie Chaplin's final speech in "The Great Dictator," a speech that is followed by Nathan Grey's beautiful vocals, honest and angry in scream and heartfelt and reflective without, however, losing a touch of anger in clean. The lyrics discourse is just the same, sincere, hopeful yet decidedly aggressive and desperate, words of weary people, tired of what we see every day, tired of that life-devouring monster called religion, tired of antiquated and violent lines of thought and, in general, of hate: examples can be found in the aforementioned "Heads Will Roll" "Fuck your prophets, Fuck your Holy Wars" and "Altar Of God" "Why teach them how to kill, you just teach them how to hate/ Control taught as love, directive from above / Strike like an eagle and sacrifice the dove" all seasoned with messages of hope as in "Never Said" (In my opinion, one of the peaks of the album") and of course from the excerpts from Chaplin's speech.

Appreciable solutions for originality are not lacking either, the main riff of "Wolves Of Babylon" is not something you hear every day in the Hardcore field, and the interesting ideas certainly do not stop there. The closure of this great comeback is entrusted to "Prey," a very melodic and captivating piece, a continuous crescendo on both the instrumental and lyrical levels that explodes at the finale, without needing to resort to scream singing, reaching a huge level of emotional involvement and testifying to the excellent compositional skills of the band's members, a text to shout at the top of your lungs which, having reached the peak, slowly fades into:

"I'm sorry but we have lost the way, I'm sorry..."

Well, did I already say that "While A Nation Sleeps" sounds as if the long pause never happened? Yes? Well, there's a downside to all this, because of Boysetsfire my expectations for any return of a band that has been absent for a long time but with a glorious past behind them will rise significantly.