Flying On Clipped Wings

It’s a bit of a cliché to say that a band or singer or teen idol saved your life. It’s hyperbole, often a sympathy call online or a means of validating your fandom when validation isn’t really needed. Having said that though, music does have a certain power. It can pick your mood up by letting you switch off and just enjoy the vibe. It can help push out the negativity building up in your gut, suffocating negativity, by forcing the tears out. It’s never gonna be too busy, you don’t need to lie to it, it’s just always there. Listening to music will get you through quite a bit. While not a solution, compared to a number of other coping techniques like smoking, drinking and self-harm, it’s a safe way of taking the edge off the shit parts of life.   To keep the top paragraph from looking more like an empty platitude written by a blithering idiot who sat in on one psychology lecture over orientation week and thinks they understand people, I should give some context. Mental illness is s

Bring Me The Horizon have come a long way from the shaky days of their first EP, released 10 years ago. With a trio of stellar records (Suicide Season, There Is A Hell…, Sempiternal), they changed the metalcore game, blending unorthodox elements like orchestras and electronics with a signature rawness and personality that was all their own.   Their fifth album, That’s The Spirit is an even further step away from that field, being closer to the 1975 than their former counterparts Architects or Parkway Drive. So does it succeed? Following in the footsteps of Sempiternal, That’s The Spirit is a rather diverse album, stepping out in a number of different directions. Opening track Doomed is a slow burner, a largely electronic number with more of the angelic clean singing frontman   Oli developed on the last album. Happy Song and Throne both dip their toes in the nu metal waters with thick drop tuned riffs and massive sing along choruses. Tracks like Follow You and Oh No however push t

Of all the melodic hardcore bands to come about in recent years, and that genre has had a massive resurgence, Counterparts have always stood out, and would be my personal favourite. Sitting in the same metalcore/melodic hardcore crossover zone as The Ghost Inside and Stick To Your Guns, Counterparts are notable for their emotionally devastating lyrics and a unique sound, technical without being obtrusive, raw but still packing a punch, harking back to bands like Misery Signals and Poison The Well. Their latest album, Tragedy Will Find Us, was released back in July on Pure Noise Records. So what to make of it? In many ways this album could have been hamstrung by expectation. Their previous album, The Difference Between Hell And Home had broke a lot of new ground for the band and stands as one of the most powerful albums to come out of hardcore. Tragedy manages to avoid this spectacularly, being this band's best album to date. All the elements that made Counterparts great have