Antagonist A.D - We Are The Dead (Album)
» Parkway Drive - UNSW Roundhouse, NSW - June 14, 2008
Antagonist A.D. are back (or are they just now appearing?) with a new CD, We are the Dead. An uncompromising burst of raw hardcore, unfortunately that doesn’t necessarily mean the album is worth buying. However, some potential doth lie herein. The album cover and CD I think look quite cool with their black marker scrawl-drawings; however, the best thing is, despite this being a hardcore/metalcore band, the lyrics printed in the booklet are for once actually legible.
Antagonist A.D. were once just called Antagonist. The band formed under this name in 2005, and released their debut album in 2006; ‘These Cities, Our Graves’. However, they changed their name to support the release of We are the Dead with 2008. The music is pretty heavy hardcore; typical high-pitched guitars, raw throat-destroying screaming, and alternating slow/fast, melodic/brutal changes (although there are pure melodic parts in WATD). There is a considerable amount of promise; the guitars are styled quite nicely, the singer manages to keep his voice variable even a t the high pitch he utilizes, and the band manages to capture quite a bit of the rhythmic progression that the best corporate-hate hardcore strives for. As a personal favourite, the band even included song-meanings for most of their tracks in the liner notes. Win.
However, there are also several pretty plain problems with We are the Dead. The first is the length of the album. The song lengths are only about 2.20 mins long on average. Now, I have no problems with short songs; by all means, if you’ve played everything you want to play and think you have a good song, then end it short. However, if all you’re songs are short, have more of them on an album! Antagonist has a mere 10 songs on their album; this puts the total length at just over 22 minutes. To say it plainly, it’s an EP length that will no doubt be sold at an album’s price.
Another problem is that the songs all sound pretty similar; so much so that, despite the mere 22 minute length, the songs have a tendency to blur together in the background unless you really focus on them. A little more variation (note; pauses in the music is not variation) would have gone a long way here. Also, despite the fact that the song-meanings in the album booklet seem like decent and worthy causes to dedicate songs to, the lyrics are… well, to be blunt, crap. There is no rhyme, no eloquence, and no real imagery; instead it just seems a cadence of words like ‘raped’, ‘blood’ and ‘fighting’. Passion is not everything…
An interesting effort from Antagonist A.D. Sone people will eat up it. Personally, though, I’d wait for their next effort before forking over an album’s worth.
