Exit Ten

Remember The Day

Written by: AP on 05/09/2008 15:36:15

Behold, emerging from the fallout of Bullet For My Valentine's shooting stardom are Britain's next hyper-riders, Exit Ten. What began as a punk/metal covers project at the turn of the millennium gradually evolved into original material some believe will champion a new wave of British metal. It's more technical than Bullet, but less experimental than Enter Shikari, poppier than Funeral For A Friend, but less upbeat than Killswitch. On paper this reads like a good recipe. It is, after all, a somewhat less conventional approach to (not again) metalcore. But the group's debut effort, "Remember the Day", suffers from being too ambitious: it's everything without belonging anywhere.

Instead of employing the expected pattern of screamed verses and clean sung choruses, the order here has been reversed, which in itself has some potential. What doesn't, however, is the ridiculous overproduction on Ryan's effect-laden voice. Coming off as wailing rather than singing, it sounds like a miserable attempt at mimicking that subtle echo in Howard Jones' choruses, and while it may well have worked for Ryan's indie-funk project in the past, it increases the boring here by a factor of ten. Let's face it, his voice just doesn't have the strength to steal the show in this kind of music. It's here that Stuart and Joe attempt to bring the shredding from Reading to the rescue. In vain. Heavily influenced by the metalcore heavyweights, the guitarists take no risks. We've heard these riffs before, and while they're essentially good, strong riffs, they sound unambitious. Distorted though they may be, they sound too clean and flaccid to have a striking effect.

"Remember the Day" is a calculated album. Its few highlights are downplayed by a vocal performance that tempts the use of the word annoying, and while there is substantial effort from the instrumental front to draw attention from it, it's too neat to cause any awe. What this all comes down to is that although it attempts to break metalcore's curse of generic, the album only succeeds in strengthening it. That is not to say, however, that there is no promise here. "Remember the Day" is professional and the talent is there, but the band needs to channel its strength in other directions and gain the courage to express whatever they want to, not what they're expected to express.

5

Download: Technically Alive, Resume Ignore, Warriors
For the fans of: Dead Poetic, Finch, Funeral For A Friend
Listen: Myspace

Release date 16.06.2008
Pinnacle

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