There’s one thing you can’t do with Poison The Well, and that’s pigeonhole them with every other post-hardcore band around right now. As ‘You Come Before You’ was different from ‘Tear from the Red’, ‘Versions’ is different again. Infact it’s already been lauded as, and I quote from Amazon, ‘nothing less than the next step-forward for the entire genre’. Heady words indeed, but there’s a musical maturity on this album that puts some of their peers to shame – and while it may not quite be the second coming, the vast musical landscapes and the sheer thought put into making this album stand out means PTW deserve a hell of a lot of credit.
I mean it’s easy to write a Hawthorne Heights-esque pop record nowadays and sell a million. And on a label the size of Ferret the band could, if they wanted, sell a lot of copies doing something disposable. So it’s to Poison The Well‘s credit for moving away from what’s popular, switching from the Deftones-esque ‘Nagaina’, which has some kind of eerie keys thing going on in the background, to the much more traditional hardcore of ‘The Notches That Create Your Headboard’.
Recorded in Sweden with producers Pelle Henricsson and Eskil Lovstro – the masterminds responsible for Refused‘s “The Shape of Punk to Come” – the band’s sound has been refined no end; they’re hard-hitting and visceral, yet at times they manage to sound melodic and catchy. In terms of a genre which is surely due to implode with the sheer weight of soundalikes, PTW deserve credit for looking at ways to sound a little different. Once again they’ve come up with the goods.