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Brutality Will Prevail

Suspension Of Consciousness

Written by: PP on 21/06/2014 14:26:25

While we're on the topic of British hardcore bands, here's another group who have reached their third album: Brutality Will Prevail. Relying far more on the metallic side of the hardcore, featuring two-step friendly melodies, beatdown sections, and anonymous growling as opposed to the lingering melodies and decipherable vocals of their more melodic counterparts, "Suspension Of Consciousness" offers little change from the mediocre "Scatter The Ashes" from two years ago. It's fast, it's vicious, and it's brutally aggressive throughout, but that's just not enough to keep listeners interested in the long run.

Occasionally, the band injects semi-clean vocals, such as on "Abandon", which features a chorus with some clean vocals and a brooding guitar melody as well. This is when the band are at their best, but unfortunately all of the good sections are wrapped around nothingsaying breakdown sections, where slowed down chugging and beatdowns break any flow the songs might have otherwise had. We've previously seen bands who can do this style convincingly enough for that not to matter, but Brutality Will Prevail lack enough memorable passages on their album overall to do that.

It's not for a lack of trying, though. "Martyr-Anxiety", for example, ups the tempo into relentless freight train levels and generally feels like a truck is being driven into a brick wall time and time again. It features a guest appearance from Cancer Bats' very own Liam Cormier, whose performance feels right at home on the album considering they are the closest soundalike to BWP together with Trash Talk. "Escapist" offers another stab at variety, with a very slow, haunting clean vocal passage packed amidst the (rather generic) metalcore riffage and brutalized yells and screams of their vocalist. The track works because of the former passage, but is held down by the more generic nature of the song overall. Together with "Abandon", it is clear that these two are the best material on the record, which isn't saying much on a 12 track album. The rest of the album doesn't offer very much to write home about, and that's because it's very generic, very standard, and very nothingsaying in its delivery. It's still a lot faster than the down-tempo hardcore of their early material, but even after several weeks of listening to the record, I can't for the life of me remember anything from it. That's not a good sign.

Download: Abandon, Escapist
For the fans of: Cancer Bats, Trash Talk,
Listen: Facebook

Release date 07.04.2014
Siege Of Amida / Century Media