As I Lay Dying - Frail Words Collapse

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• AS I LAY DYING FRAIL WORDS COLLAPSE

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Free Music Review: A Great Album By A Great Band
Hit: 5 Stars

Onto As I Lay Dying. I personally love this album, front to back. It is an amazing display of very melodic yet heavy, crunching guitars, the most astounding drum work I've heard to date, and a chugging bass that some people claim not to hear. Being a bassist, I can hear these things, and the baselines aren't too difficult, but they are still technical and dramatic. They add dimension, such as the intro to "Behind Me Lies Another Fallen Soldier", in which the bass is the whole melody part, with some piano it sounds like, with a guitar "solo-esque" line playing in the middle ground.

As I Lay Dying is a band that can put together a fantastic song. The lyrics are heartfelt, yet powerful and damaging. They are written for a screamer, hence them being short, sweet, and simple. I really like how the vocalist can go from a howl/bark/scream to a soft very nice singing voice. However, his sung part as very distant, almost whispers in the night, and are few and far between. He sings only twice.

Ontop of the excellent vocalist, the guitars can change from a chugging crunchy riff, to an assult, to sludgy, to a melodic almost acoustic sound. They really know how to mix it up in this band. In most songs, the guitars take influence from many genres and throw it into a great end product. The guitars often change to very different sounds throughout the same song, adding great structure and direction within a track.

The bass guitar is less noticable, and plays along with the drums, almost always behind. What people don't realize is that when the guitars get heavy, it's almost always because the bass comes in low and heavy, not the guitars. The bass lines are not extraordinary, but they took me a while to learn. The bass in "Behind Me Lies Another Fallen Soldier" during the intro is simple, but so powerful and melodic. Sometimes simple is just as good as technically demanding. I say this from a bassist's point of view.

The drumming. Between the bonecrushing double bass peddle assaults, and the slow consistant yet technical beat of "Song 10" and "Behind Me Lies Another Fallen Soldier", this drummer knows what he's doing. The drum roll at the beginning of "Forever" to kick off the powerhouse of a song, really sets up a great song. The drummer uses the bass drum for everything, he never really rolls on his snare, and doesn't use a very large array of cymbals. The floor tom on "Forever" is powerful and full of bass, obviously it was reworked after recording. The drumming is an art form on this album.

The single "94 Hours" is the kick off of the album. It's full of energy and has one of the best double bass assaults I've ever had the honour of listening to. The stand out tracks for me are "94 Hours", "Forever", "Behind Me Lies Another Fallen Soldier", "Song 10", "A Thousand Steps" and "Elegy". AILD puts the two slow songs in just the right place, "BMLAFS" at track 6, and "Song 10" at it's respective track 10. The ablum structure is nicely laid out, and even though some songs start off the same way, they ened up very different. Some tracks are timeless, but only clock 2:30, while others really do last forever, "Forever" clocks 5:20 or so.

This album is a great creation. It isn't quite metal, but it's getting there. It is very "hardcore/screamo" but it has so much outside infulence that I personally can't lable it cleanly.

A great buy for anyone interested in great music. It isn't over-produced, and is a great relief from the crappy pop culture that has infested the minds of the young and impressionable.

As I lay Dying puts on great live shows aswell.

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