New Albums In ‘Not As Good As Last One’ Shocker « The War Within

This is the first in an experiment of trying to write shorter, more readable posts. Also maybe even regular posts. Madness!

Rise Against – Endgame

I have never seen Rise Against perform live. I feel like I'm really missing out. These guys have so consistently pumped out excellent albums (since Siren Song of the Counter Culture, their first on a major label, back in 2004) that bothering to wonder what to think about this one seemed like something of a waste of time. "These guys wrote Saviour, Like The Angel, Survive… they can't go wrong!"

Well… they haven't so much gone wrong as they have… I'm not sure. Maybe they shot themselves in the foot by writing so many good albums prior to this one that there was always a statistically significant chance that the quality wouldn't quite be maintained. Not that it's a bad album, oh, far from it! Architects and Help Is On The Way are classic Rise Against of the very highest quality, and the album will certainly grow on you, but it's not track-after-track of audio excellence, as previous offerings have been. Political commentary is hit and miss: on Make It Stop (September's Children) the guys sing a poignant ode to bullied gay youngsters, but Survivor Guilt, with its spoken-word dialogue (no idea where it's lifted from), is particularly unsubtle. There's also a few instances where Tim Mcllrath's lyrics aren't as inspired as they usually are.

Still, overall, these are churlish things to pick at. When the worst thing you can say about an album is, "It's not quite as amazing as their last one," well, you're still laughing. For all that it suffers by comparison with its predecessors, Endgame is still a well-crafted collection of songs. I just hope its name isn't as ominous as it sounds.

Funeral For A Friend – Welcome Home Armageddon

I have a feeling this one is going to sound remarkably similar to my thoughts above… ok, here we have Funeral For A Friend's fifth studio album, loudly trumpeted as "the one where we go back to our roots". A friend of mine theorises that FFAF have seen the writing on the wall- that the line-up alterations, label changes and scene shifts of the past few years have ensured the band remains firmly in the second tier of showbusiness, back to playing pubs in Wimbledon after almost a decade of selling out places like Brixton Academy. The cover stories for Kerrang! have become double-page spreads; there will be no more DVDs. That's the theory anyway. Whether or not FFAF think that would be a good thing is another matter. Musically they seem to want to return to their roots- maybe they think a rewind of their circumstances back to when they were recording Four Ways To Scream Your Name would be good for them too. This is the context in which I found myself listening to Welcome Home Armageddon.

One thing's for certain: it's not Casually Dressed and Deep In Conversation Part 2. This is, at best, a grower. Several songs come across with demo-like production quality (when you said you were going back to your roots, guys, I didn't expect you to mean, "Parents' cellar with an 8-track"), Matt's lyrics hit new levels of uninspiredness (which, ironically, he notes during single Front Row Seats To The End Of The World) and the sound has, unfortunately and surprisingly, not benefited from the influx of ex-Hondo Maclean members- if anything, it's got blander and more generic. Not to be too harsh: there are some real standout tracks. Front Row Seats was pre-confirmed as a great song several months ago, and it's joined by Old Hymns and Owls (Are Watching), both of which deserve to be on any sort of 'Best Of' album FFAF ever put out.

Alas, it's just not enough. Most of the songs suffer from feeling like they're about to kick off into something incredible for their entire running length, and that's the main problem right there: the album rocks along nicely but never achieves the heights it both could and ought to. This is no Hours. This is no Memory and Humanity. This isn't even a Tales Don't Tell Themselves. Hopefully this is just the first stage of the whole "getting back to our roots" thing- The Getaway Plan prior to the next This Year's Most Open Heartbreak, if you will- because there is very little on Welcome Home Armageddon that makes me want to bend my arms to look like wings.