From Autumn To Ashes - Abandon Your Friends

I wanted to enjoy the new From Autumn to Ashes album. I’ve been feeling angsty recently, so I was really looking forward for something to pour my heart out to. Into my hands pops Abandon Your Friends.

Opening track Where Do You Draw The Line starts out promising enough. There’s distorted riffs, some rhythmic muting, screaming vocals and drums which get your body moving. The album also closes with title track Abandon Your Friends which is a sufficiently moody piano based track that slowly builds to powerful guitar lines, and a haunting chorus.

Sandwiched between these two tracks though is a rather boring collection of songs. I initially hoped that second track Inapprope would be the exception on the album. The standard-punk-drumming-chorus, off key in just the right way vocals (what happened to the screaming? At least that was exciting), and nu-rock production lead to a very generic sounding piece. Unfortunately this sets the tone for most of what is to follow.

Nothing on Abandon Your Friends sounds really unique, and some how much of it even sounds tired. Tone-wise the album sounds like it was produced in the same way a Vines album might have been which is inappropriate for this style of music and may be part of the problem. This is particularly odd given that it was mixed by GGGarth, who is responsible for the sound on many highly acclaimed albums.

There are a few glimmers of hope. he Funny Thing About Getting Pistol Whipped Is… sees a return of the heavy drumming and vocals, as do Short for Show and Jack & Ginger, but the latter two sound not only like typical genre songs, they sound remarkably like each other as well. Placentapede takes the well established route of screaming the final word from each line of the chorus in the background.

Vicious Cockfight starts out with an odd acoustic finger picked section, before the real song begins, bearing no relation to the intro whatsoever. It almost seems to be there just so guitarist Jonathon Cox can point to it and go “See! I really CAN play guitar”. Not that his guitar work is shoddy on the rest of the album. There are some killer solos if you listen hard enough to notice them from somewhere within the mix.

In fact the whole album is really competent. All members are well in control of their respective instruments and singer Benjamin Perri doesn’t really sing off-key, he just has that modern-punk whine that is popular with singers in the genre these days (I assume it’s him anyway, everyone in the band aside from Cox is credited with providing vocals, but I’m going to assume as the lead singer it’s his voice we hear most often). But Streamline does show off his ability to sing, and the bands ability to harmonise over a slower composition.

On repeated listens I’ve even come to enjoy the album more than at first, but it still just seems to be lacking vitality. There’s nothing about any song which really establishes them and stops them from blending together, making it very hard to pick out highlights.

(Originally published on FasterLouder)