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Early Grave

Tomorrow I Am You

Written by: PP on 12/08/2008 15:43:00

At an average age of just barely over 17, it wouldn\'t be fair to expect Early Grave to be masterful song crafters just yet, but nonetheless their debut album \"Tomorrow I Am You\" shows some promise of potential to be fulfilled in the future. Hailing from the UK, these guys have recently been tipped as the hottest challengers to the metalcore/deathcore fusionist throne in the country, currently occupied by Bring Me The Horizon, but much work remains for that to materialize.

The album opens with a 35 second introduction that doesn\'t really serve any purpose and deserves to be skipped each and every time. The first real song, \"As Thick As Thieves\", however, is the opposite. Starting out brutally with a death metal inspired serpentine riff, the song doesn\'t try to hide its deathcore musical influences at all. Vocalist Butler, at only 18 years old, possesses an impressively evil shriek for his age, piercing the soundscape nicely to please any deathcore fan, at the same time sure to piss off anyone more accustomed to the death metal growl. Once the clean vocals arrive in the infectious \"look what you\'ve done to me\" chorus, I\'m beginning to be convinced of their potential to challange Bring Me The Horizon.

\"Golden Hearts\" has more of a punk vibe to it, with instruments blasting by at breakneck speeds, lead once again by Butler\'s inconceivably vulgar shriek. There\'s some gang vocals in the chorus and nice melodic riffing, nominating the song as the other highlight of the album.

As for the rest of the eight tracks, they\'re pretty much textbook deathcore succeeding to a varying degree. While a few are ok to listen to, mostly because I\'ve grown to like Butler\'s vocals when they are contrasted with a few clean ones (\"Dead To Me\", for instance), many of them don\'t live up to the aforementioned two, and the reason is clear: lack of clean vocals, catchy songwriting, and melodic hooks. Combine those three to the absolutely despicable production quality, and it\'s difficult to get anything else than a whirring, buzzing sound out of the songs. And before you ask, yes, the production is terrible for the two good tracks as well, but at least there the band plays on their strengths, the catchy clean chorus and the melodic hooks, making them somewhat bearable in comparison to the rest. It\'s just not nice to listen to a mesh of instrumentation with some crazy dude shrieking above it when you can\'t really hear anything properly, which subsequently is also why I don\'t have much more to say about this release. So if Early Grave better their production for the next release, I can see them climbing a few steps on our rating scale. Until then, Bring Me The Horizon doesn\'t have anything to worry about.

Download: As Thick As Thieves, Dead To Me, Golden Hearts
For the fans of: Bring Me The Horizon, Architects
Listen: Myspace

Release date 30.06.2008
Rising Records