I know it’s not cool to like Victory, but fuck it – this is brilliant. Forget Hawthorne Heights, Atreyu and any other band who has sold a six-figure amount of records, A Day To Remember are the label’s newest trump card and if they’re given half the publicity of some of those bands they’ll probably become the biggest ‘scene’ band in the world. Probably. If you crossed New Found Glory with Atreyu – or dragged Hawthorne Heights through a hedge and gave them some machismo for breakfast – you’d have ADTR nailed to a tee.
This is just 12 excellent tracks of poppy metalcore. It fuses about three successful genres of music perfectly. And I know it’s three tired genres, three types of music that should really be put down with a lethal injection, but A Day To Remember do it better than pretty much eevry band around right now. If ‘Speak of the Devil’s crunching guitar don’t get you, ‘The Plot To Bomb The Panhandle’, complete with huge hooky chorus and vocal harmonies, most certainly will. The raucous ‘Show ‘Em The Ropes’ is fast and furious and an anthem in waiting, while ‘A Shot In The Dark‘ is destined to make Atreyu sit up and go “why can’t we write songs as good as this?”
For me the only ‘bad’ song here is ‘The Price We Pay’, a track that comes across like the token slowie. And even then it’s not that bad, it just ruins the aggressive flow. During ‘Monument’ the band sing “This is my time, this is our time to shine – let nothing stand in our way.” And while that may sound cocksure, let’s face it – this is the best album released so far this year by quite some distance.