it.is.imperative from Berlin(D) play screamo. Hey, no yawning there in the back! Many people are quite fed up with screamo and its stagnation but this record doesn’t sound so dusty to me even though it was already released in 2007.
The point about screamo is that when you do it right it is great but if you do it wrong it is shitty as hell. There is no in between. If your guitar lines are lame or the vocals sound pretentious you are dead. Screamo doesn’t need perfection but it needs precision. It lives off the contrast between the beauty of the music and the mental abyss in lyrics, vocals and the way the music is played. Without this abyss or without this beauty there is no screamo no matter how great your quiet and loud or clean and distorted dynamics may be. The two questions you can ask a screamo band are: 1. do I believe them? and 2. do they touch me? A good screamo record is one that does both. A great screamo record is one that does both in an extraordinary way and/or intensity. If it makes you cry it is great. If it gives you the feeling that this whole world is a useless heap of crap it is awesome. If it makes you want to kill yourself but keeps you from doing so with its sheer beauty in the very same moment it is perfect.
This record is good. It is genuine and it has got a large amount of great melodies, drum patterns and guitar harmonies. It can’t live up to standards of let’s say Saetia or The Saddest Landscape but it is nonetheless a good screamo record. In comparison to other contemporary screamo bands’ outputs it has a little more At The Drive-In-esque groove and swing. And it has a really good sound. The bass sound is wiry, the drums don’t sound like metal (which would be the worst thing that can happen to a drum sound in any genre but metal) and the guitar sound is great. Nothing to mourn about. Screamo is not dead yet.
[jan]
www.itisimperative.de
|