From First to Last - Dear Diary, My Teen Angst Has a Body Count Released:2004 (Epitaph) From First to Last

is: Sonny Moore - Lead Vocals Matt Good- Guitar/Vocals Travis Richter- Guitar/Scream Jon Weisburg- Bass/Scream Derek - Drums/Scream Background Info: This if From First to Last's first full length, after releasing an EP. Since the EP, they picked up singer Sonny Moore, replacing their old singer who left to do more poppy things. This album is a lot heavier than their EP, but still borders on pop-punk. These guys can put on a great live show as well. Track 1: Soliloquy This track is just a quick intro, not too much to write here. Track 2: The One Armed Boxer vs. The Flying Guillotine The first noticable thing you here on this album is "Kill The L ights" not far into the first song, following a thumping drum beat. The drums are done very well in this song, as they are with most of the album. Sonny delivers a great vocal performance as well. This song tends to be pretty heavy, but the chorus is pretty catchy. After a little interlude, the song concludes with a good outro, and a quick drum solo at the end, leading right into the next song. Track 3: Note to Self This is the song most everyone has heard off this album. After a catchy little into, it bre aks out. Great drums in this song as, as well as the vocals. This song also has some good lyrical content as well. This song does get a little repititive towards the end though, and that detracts from the song a little. Again, the outro leading right into the next song. Track 4: I Liked You Better Before You Were Naked on the Internet A very creative name, not that it has anything to do with the song. This song is a break after the first two songs, lightening up a lot. The first half of the song Sonny delivers some good falsetto vocals. A very catchy drum beat goes along with this song as well. Not too long of a song, quickens up at the end leading into the next song. And you cant forget the little twinkley part in the middle of the song. Track 5: Featuring Some of Your Favorite Words This song starts off right into it, and stays with it throughout the whole song. This is one of the more catchy songs on the album, but still a good overall performance. This isn't as impressive as the first few songs, and it becomes very repititive also. Track 6: Emily This is the CD's acoustic song. Its quite a well written song, both lyrically and musically. It's not often you have a lead guitar part in an acoustic song. Not too long, but it's one of the better songs on the CD. Sonny's performance is disappointing compared to the other songs, as he gets really whiney. Track 7: Secrets Don't Make Friends This song gets into it right after the acoustic song, being one of the heavier songs on the album. Nothing

amazing instrumentally, but Sonnys vocals stand out on the track. As do the lyrics. Track 8: Populace in Two This is one of my favorite songs on the album. It isn't too heavy, but Sonny does the vocals very well, and the lyrics are well written. The drums in this song are probably the best part instrumentally, as well as the little guitar solo near the end. Track 9: Kiss Me, I'm Contagious Guitarist Travis Richter picks up the mic for the main vocals of this song. This is probably the heaviest song on the CD. As I said, Travis does most of the song, so that means it's mostly screaming, with Sonny getting in there every once in a while. It has a really catching lead guitar part after the second chorus, accompained by "Can I touch your legs? Do I make you sweat?" Track 10: Minuet This song is simple, just some good acoustic lead guitar work. Track 11: Ride the Wings of Pestilence This is by far the best song on the album. Very well done all around, vocals, music, and lyrics. Again, great drums, and suprisingly good lead guitar work on this one too. Sonnys vocals are excellent as with most of the album. Pretty dark lyrics compared to the rest of the CD, but very well written. This is their first single, you can catch the video on fuse. Track 12: (Hidden Track) It's not really hidden, because it actually is another track, it's just not shown on the CD. This song isn't meant to be serious, but it is still a great performance. One of the best besides Ride the Wings. Some very spiteful lyrics directed to some girl. And what r eally suprised me, they bring in a rapper and have the last verse rapped. This is done by Major League Playa. The song ends the CD with a powerfully screamed "Drop it like it's hot, shake it like a salt shaker". Favorite Tracks The One Armed Boxer vs. The Flying Guillotine Emily Populace in Two Ride the Wings of Pestilence Overall/Rating: This is one of the best albums of the genre that I've heard in a long time. I'd suggest it to anyone into pop-punk, and anyone into any other kind of music. Overall it's just an amazing album with few downsides. I give it a 4/5.

Summary: Hypno5e prove that their unique style of ambient metal can bring creativity back to the music world. France has provided us with quality metal the last few years: Gojira, Gorod, Blut Aus Nord, the list goes on. One band has been around just as long as these bands, but hardly anyone in the USA knew of them before they were announced to headline the Music as Art tour. Formed in 2003, they released their debut

album "Des Deux L'une Est L'autre" in 2007. After listening to just a few minutes of their album on their myspace, I immediately downloaded the album. Hypno5e is a very unique band, combining the polyrhythm techniques of bands like Hacride and Textures, along with very deep ambient sections filled with voice clips. Their songs stray into BTBAM territory, with 3 songs on this album going past 10 minutes. I know, the thought of ambient + 10 minutes is terr ifying, but Hypno5e makes it interesting. "Des Deux L'une Est L'autre" is a beast meant to be listened to in one listen. Although some songs such as "Maintained Relevance of Destruction Pt. 1" and "Daybreak At Slaughterhouse" work very well on their own, the album shines when put together as one furious entity. As with most ambient bands, the band is best experienced live, putting together an atmosphere that is unique. They get the lights, backgrounds, and put it to excellent use in their shows. If you missed them on the Metal as Art tour, chances are you won't get the chance to see them for a very long time. The beginning of the album is a two parter, "Maintained Relevance of Destruction". The album begins with light ambient sounds and then kicks it into overdrive with riffage. All musicians show their talent here, with Emmanuel Jessua (who is also the vocalist) and Jeremie Lautier kicking you in the face with their guitars. Drummer/sampler Thibault Lamy thoroughly impresses with his skill at the drums an d makes them work effectively throughout the ambient and heavy parts. Their bassist, known as Gredin, absolutely shreds, and you can actually hear the bass over the guitar. Daybreak at Slaughterhouse is the single of the album, and for good reason. It clearly has the most memorable riffs of the album, but at 9:40, it's not a hit and run. The song progressively pounds its way into your skull, moving between ambient and heavy sections throughout the song. This is also where the vocals are top notch, Jessua's screaming is a force to be reckoned with and his singing during the ambient parts furthers the mood of the piece. It's also during this song where we understand why they call themselves "a video concept band". This song was made to paint a moving picture, which is why they made a video for it! Watching the video certainly makes the alot more atmospheric. I highly recommend watching it after listening to the entire album. Next on the album, we are given the song with the strange title "H492053". Comprised of mostly ambient sections, we are treated to a polyrhythm fest in the middle of the song. Aside from background clean vocals during the ambient sections, there are no vocals to be had on this one. The album progresses to the "The Hole" which gives us various French voice clips and some nice keyboards to listen to. We get a combination of singing and screaming during the metal of the song, which is a rather nice touch. Aside from the vocals, the instrumentation reminded me a bit of Gojira, which I'm sure is not a coincidence. Hypno5e always put their own flavor on everything they do though, so it certainly is unique. This song is followed up by another long song, "Scarlet Fever", however, they do not drag out or feel boring whatsoever. At this point in the album, I was convinced that they band would do an excellent job even if they cut all of their ambient parts out. Don't get me wrong, they are absolutely essential to the band's unique sound as it is, but they would do quite well as a Gojira -Hacride type band. "Tutuguri" is probably the most brutal song on the album. Aside from a few short ambient sections and some voice clips, the song is mostly Jessua and Lautier pushing out excellent riff after another. The album then goes into it's second two parter, "Naked Lunch". The first part is the longest song on the album, clocking in at almost 12 minutes, and it's almost entirely ambient. However, the song is one of the most interesting on the album, putting the sampling and electronic sounds to good use, proving that if they wanted to, Hypno5e could pretty much be any genre they want to be, as is obvious on "Naked Lunch II" which sounds very much like Horse the Band, combining electronic sounds with heavy guitar riffs. The last song is "Remords Posthumes", it works efficiently closing off the album with some chatter in the background with some keyboards. Hypno5e say that their style is the future of metal. If this becomes true, then I look forward to the high amount of creativity and technicality in future metal bands. The very opposite could very well take place, and we could all be listening to the latest core style named after a sea creature. But Hypno5e gives me hope for now at least, that you can always find something new and exciting in music.

Recommended Tracks: All Of It.

Refused The Shape of Punk to Come: A Chimerical Bombination in 12 Bursts [Deluxe Edition]
[Epitaph; 2010]
9.4

Find it at: Insound Vinyl | eMusic | Amazon MP3 & CD

No band has ever mastered the ominous cymbal tap quite like Refused. On the Swedish hardcore band's final album and masterpiece, David Sandstrm's shivering tings signal a sort of warning. They usually come right as the band launches from tense, coiled quiet into all-out assault-- or, if they're already in assault mode, from one head-spinning riff to another. Those transitions come up a lot on 1998's The Shape of Punk to Come, and they keep you on your toes. Throughout the record, the band found some platonic ideal of tension-and-release, mutating constantly and pulling in all sorts of vaguely silly genre-leap ideas (chintzy techno beats! jazz breaks!) without altering the fundamental heaviness that they were so great at. It's the sound of a world-class hardcore band deciding that they're done with hardcore, that they want to push their music in all sorts of unexpected directions, and then just ending up with an amazing hardcore album at the end. The Shape of Punk to Come has always been an album with a certain mystique, from the Ornette Coleman-referencing title (Coleman tweaked the title of a book by H.G. Wells for his LP The Shape of Jazz to Come)to the clouds-gathering whisper of a closing track, "The Apollo Programme Was a Hoax". It's far and away the best thing Refused ever did, and it's also the album that broke Refused up; they could reportedly barely stand each other by the time they got done with the thing. Besides the world-exploding album, Epitaph's new reissue includes all kinds of extras: A furious live album, a documentary, the incredibly pretentious original liner notes, music videos, and footage of the band playing every song on the album in concert. It's a lot to get through, and it's almost all rewarding; you learn, through crystalline recordings and grainy video, that Refused were the type of live band that would slice the top of your skull off. But what the whole package doesn't offer is a sense of context. For all the bluster of the title, it's not like the album invented angular guitar spazz-outs or prevented punk rock,

as a whole, from falling into MySpace-emo hell a few years later (though it is telling that Paramore-- arguably the best of the MySpace emo wave, for whatever that's worth-liberally quoted Refused's "Liberation Frequency" on their first album). Refused Are Fuckin Dead, the accompanying documentary, is supposed to explain why the band broke up in the wake of this clarion-call album, but it mostly just consists of arted-up landscape shots and ex-band members speaking as vaguely as possible about how much pressure they put on themselves. (Pet peeve: No chyrons to identify who's talking. Come on.) We don't learn what these guys did. So here's what I think they did: They synthesized some of the greatest ideas to come out of American hardcore in the 1990s, and gave them just enough production sheen so that they sounded huge. Nation of Ulysses and Born Against were two of Refused's favorite reference points, and you can hear Nation of Ulysses' sloganeering, off-kilter skronk and Born Against's grainy, ferocious all-angles roar all over the album. But neither of those bands ever produced a document as viscerally gripping as The Shape of Punk to Come. That's partly because those bands never cared much for fidelity, whereas you can feel every one of Refused's snare-rolls in your chest. But it's also because Refused were great songwriters. It's a stretch to link what this band did to Sweden's tradition for popcraft; after all, they weren't working with verse-chorus-verse structures or striving for melodic clarity. But it's pretty amazing how intuitively the members of Refused knew how to put together a hardcore song. Every track holds back at the right moments, explodes at the right moments. "New Noise", now and forever their defining statement, has an intro that lasts more than a minute-- insinuating, building, teasing, drawing back, and then suddenly shooting off out of nowhere. And when it kicks in, singer Dennis Lyxzn screaming, "Can I scream?!" as the guitars blast in behind him, is just a singularly thrilling moment of music. The guitar-crunch frenzy and Ric Flair whoops that follow are monstrous, but it's that intro that sticks with me. And the album has plenty more moments that annihilate. Lyxzn's yelping, pleading, wailing vocal on "Liberation Frequency". The shockingly pretty quiet bits on "Protest Song '68", right before the fragment-bomb drums rip through. The epic, mournful gypsy violin on "Tannuser/Deriv". The album absolutely does not sound like the work of a group of dudes who aren't speaking to each other. Rhythmically, all members are locked-in, feeding off each other's energy and authority. (Even without those cymbal taps, you could make a pretty good case for Sandstrm as the best punk drummer ever; he's on fire throughout.) They also sound like they trust each other enough to allow in potentially dubious ideas, like the cheesy Casio-techno breaks that occasionally pop up. And even those moments work in the context of the album; they're the parts where you get to compose yourself in anticipation of the next onslaught. Those techno bits underline how over the top The Shape of Punk to Come can get, sometimes to the point of ridiculousness. The first lyric on the thing is this awkward-asfuck line: "I got a bone to pick with capitalism, and a few to break." The title of the song "Deadly Rhythm", it turns out, refers to "the production line." But as hammy as those gestures might be, they also reinforce the album's central theme: Complacency is a creeping, crippling disease, one that every structure of society seeks to encourage, and it's something you have to flail against constantly, every day. As simplistic as that concept might be, it's also a potent one, and it led these guys, screaming in their second

language, to make an album as brain-obliterating as this one-- even if it spun them to pieces in the process.

Norma Jean
Bless The Martyr and Kiss the Child

Artist Info:Discography Album length: 11 tracks Street Date: August 13, 2002

The hardcore revolution has come in the form of this technically and musically astounding offering from Norma Jean. Ever since seeing these guys live in 2000 right after they signed to Solid State as Luti-Kriss, I knew they were special. Their newest project, under new name Norma Jean so not to be confused with the secular rap artist, Bless The Martyr and Kiss the Child, offers gritty production while still managing to rise above the quality of most similar bands. Bless The Martyr kicks off with the song "The Entire World is Counting on Me...," showing a marked improvement on Josh's vocals, with considerably less usage of vocal effects. The next track, "Face:Face" is a song inspired by Proverbs 30. "Memphis Will be Laid To Waste," features vocals from the lead singer of MeWithoutYou. Its lyrics show the definite Christian foundation of the band, stating Christ is not a fashion or a fleeting fad. Other track highlights include "Creating Something out Of Nothing, Only to Destroy It," and "I Used to Hate Cell Phones, But now I Hate Car Accidents." The only downsides to this album are the fact that the album's sound is slightly repetitious, and that the second half of the record is not as strong as the first. While the gritty recording style and extreme hardcore vocals and music may not be for everyone, fans of hardcore will find this CD a must-have. With excellent musical performances from all members of the band, including great vocals (both low-end and high), amazing guitar work, and a drum sound that has to be heard to be believed, hardcore just does not get much better than this. - Review date: 2/11/03, written by Andy Kelly

4.0 excellent steveconygre USER (7 Reviews)

December 31st, 2006 | 18 replies | 2,493 views

Summary: I think its on fourfa.com that Sunny Day Real Estate is what Emo kids make love to, well this should be what metal kids make love to

1 of 1 thought this review was well written

Khoma are (mainly): Jan Jamte - Vocals Johannes Persson - Guitar Fredrik Kihlberg - Guitar/Vocals/Piano

This started out as a side project, OK Ive got it out of the way. Yes, they can be vehicles for self indulgence, but then we also have Team Sleep, A Perfect Circle and Bright Eyes keen on bucking the musical trend. Besides, when a side project includes members of Cult Of Luna and The Perishers are you really going to write them off? Like Bright Eyes, Khoma consist of a core set of three members, and then they work with other musicians on different songs to make it more of a collective. This approach allows the three founding members to control a general direction of the band and let the guests interpret the soundscapes to create variation.

Soundscapes is the ideal word to sum this album up. Its a beautiful, melodic, soaring metal album that uses crunching guitars to layer foundations for mountainous choruses. It uses ambient effects to create sparseness when Jans haunting vocals need room to breathe and powerful drumming to drive the listener to where Khoma can make you feel comfortable before the band lurch towards a breakdown.

These dynamics should be familiar to anyone whos listened to Cult of Luna, Deftones, Isis and maybe even Red Sparowes. The main difference is that there are no screamed vocals. This only enhances the bands musicianship because to create the same sense of variety in an album or even a song they have to work so much harder. In fact, whilst the music is varied in terms of time sigs, tempos, keys etc the song structures are the most traditional part of the whole album, which represents the real reason why this had to be a side project. Almost without fail the dynamic is a loud/quiet one, its probably the easiest way to see the way classic rock and metal has had an impact on these guys.

It also makes Khoma a very accessible band for people who are maybe just starting to listen to heavier music, or for people who feel screaming isnt something they can get on with. Dont read accessible as simple though, a good example is the end of One of Must Hang with its rolling drums, effects, guitars and strings all flowing at an amazing rate.

If the idea of classic rock song structures with modern production values, heavier guitars, layers of effects, strings, keys, technical yet considered musicianship and truly stunning vocals doesnt

appeal because you are used to the challenge of some modern (post) metal bands then this may not be enough for you.

What Id recommend is listening to the best track on the album Like Coming Home and making your mind up from it. Its a love song, and contains some beautiful expressions of how it feels like the lyric:

If I can spare one thought when my days are counted, please let me remember when we first kissed

That this line is matched by Jans voice reaching a beautiful height only serves to make its impact all the more effective. I cant praise Jan enough really, his voice is amazing, its like a warm hot velvety chocolaty drink that soothes and excites in equal measure. When it hits the bridge of Like Coming Home his range becomes apparent as he hits higher and higher notes, whilst the guitars crescendo before breaking and ebbing away to leave the effects that were the undercurrent for the whole time.

Then the song is followed by a piano and light guitar ballad that calms thing down a little more. In fact, the song arrangement on here is maybe the truest test of their abilities because this is a collection of songs rather than the more conceptual feel of their other bands. In this way, when they put the bombastic rock songs with huge choruses next to one of the slower songs you know they were preparing an album in a way that was slightly alien to them, and so by making it work its quite impressive.

Khoma may not be the most experimental band in metal right now, but they deserve to be in your CD collection because these songs are honest, well written and passionate pieces of music made by extraordinary musicians.