Norma Jean - Vs The Anti Mother (Album)
The new album from Norma Jean, Vs The Anti-Mother, is their 4th album to boot. The cover art features… something. With no confidence at all, I say it appears to festering entrails covering a metal grill, with flies all over it. Lovely! With cover art like this and songs like Birth of the Anti-Mother and Discipline Your Daughters, you’d never guess they were a Christian act, would you…?
Norma Jean are a hardcore/light metalcore act out of Atlanta in the United States. They’ve had a succession of line-up changes since their conception in 2001, but currently they are a 5-piece. While hardly an international best-seller, Norma Jean have had some e successes, and if you haven’t heard of them, odds are that friends of yours who are into less-than-mainstream hardcore and metal bands will have. They managed to grab a slot on the 2008 Warped Tour, so maybe we’ll hear more about them in the future. Although, their website and MySpace being as poorly constructed and shameless in self-promotion as I’ve ever seen, and digital audiences being as picky as they are today, maybe we won’t…
The music of Vs The Anti-Mother is a touch lighter, slower and less chaotic than other metalcore acts like Shai Hulud; it has a more hardcore/thrash sort of feel to it. The album is a mix of nice, decent tracks with effective sound techniques and quite a bit of punch, and tracks that you quickly forget about. Most people will find a few they like in this, and forget the rest of the album. There IS, however, quite a bit of nice innovation in the album – some of the musical progressions are quite interesting, the darker, heavier riffs have a nice weight to them (vaguely reminiscent of old-school Korn on some tracks) and the vocals are quite decent in their capacity to carry the music. Some good stuff coming through on the back of several years of experience.
The winning tracks to me were pretty clear; Robots 3: Humans 0, Surrender your Sons and Opposite of left & wrong all have that something special which promote them above the rest of the album. Opposite... in particular has some very cool imbalanced vocal chant work throughout the track, which couples with some nice guitar work and a decent chorus to become a great song.
Some pretty good stuff from Norma Jean. Probably not the awesome album that long-time fans were no doubt hoping for, but a solid effort all the same.
