Circle Of Demons

 Century Media is serving up an almost unmanageable pile of metal this year, all of it decked out with genre-busting labels, and the label’s golden rule of ear-testing the outer limits wasn’t betrayed with the release of the new record by At All Cost either. Circle Of Demons is the latest in a string of extreme products from this American band, which has taken the group to a new level of post-hardcore arrogance. According to the label, At All Cost are so diverse, so unbounded as songwriters and so thrash- and rock-literate that they deserve attention in our neck of the woods too. If they could completely blow away the skepticism in the critical part of Century Media founder Robert Kampf’s brain, then they must be alright, right?

But the Texan quintet paints a completely different picture from the expected one after the very first listen. After their 2005 debut, when they scraped together the rather coolly received critics’ record It’s Time To Decide, they set themselves the pretty ambitious goal of building a fully independent and rock-solid musical voice. Producer Rory Phillips was supposed to help with that, but the only thing that shows up with any dignity is the schizophrenia of vocally split frontman Andrew Collins, who automatically hones his vocal cords as the main weapon in his musical reckoning with the audience and unsuspecting listeners, and persistently raises the middle finger as an expression of totally “authentic and original” rebellion. Still, the whiff of genre-mixing is nothing new. At All Cost only invented lukewarm water there. And you can’t really blame them, since that’s the only way to be a true defender of the metalcore colors, right? So what does the album offer? First, the title track, ‘Circle Of Demons’, during which those of you who still smoke can try lighting a cigarette and chain it down to the end at double speed, while the album races past you at light speed all the way to the last track, and in between the Texan louts try to convince you of their “originality” by mixing metal with technical samples, which are just a cliché spill of low-quality semen onto an even less suitable dry soil of musical enjoyment. Even the stuff that might grab you and lift you into higher spheres is just a moment of brilliance wrapped in computer bleeping and utterly superfluous babbling; apart from empty, flat boredom over the continuing musical excursion, you listen to the guitar passages of Trey Ramirez and Michael Carrigan Throeald with only one ear, as they try to compete with the sound engineer over a ton of coke and other opiates. The most hurt and demented because of this are the vocals, which thin out even the little herd of all-satisfied extremists who expect rock’n’roll and get diarrhea. Helping that along is a mix of metalcore melodiousness in the manner of Unearth, which is actually a very edible part of the musical steak, but AFI and the rest of the whining convince you far less, thanks to which the demons of withdrawal creep into your subconscious, ready to hit full force if Cher and Sum 41 teamed up for a duet, hoping for a spot on the metalcore palette of musical “connoisseurs”. And following the train of thought is a peculiar kind of fun, handing the critics extra aces. ‘Get Down For The Revolution’ is an insanely unoriginal call to rebellion, and the peak of vacuum-filler pretense is the lyrics of ‘Ride Through The Storm’, which blues along and tangle an already overcomplicated mass into an unrecognizable smudge with the lines “Work, baby—work, baby, you’ll get your break!”, which any sane musician full of ideas would mostly steer clear of – this is supposedly metal, not a motivational speech at some retail giant or, say, at Amway… And that’s what you get from guys posing with their hands in a puddle of blood. Real solid, macho and “original”, no doubt. Quite surprising is how the already unpromising gets made worse by overdoing the gimmickry to the max, as in the vocal mix on a passage of ‘ Leaving Forever’. No, what you heard while listening was not a guest vocal from Stephen Hawking, but just an expression of total loss of identity, which could have done much more, but they ran out of ideas to finish it. Maybe just willpower. Or maybe it’s a new element in the “salvation” of the metalcore genre. If so, then the genre needs a bullet to the head or, for those a bit less violent, just a well-measured mercy shot.

What could have been the band’s ticket to eternal glory, and to constantly being cited as a rather shatteringly sincere musical outpouring of metalcore fullness, has become a bargain-bin haggling item. Whoever buys purely for the label and the cover won’t complain much. At All Cost are undoubtedly exotic. But those of us who swear by musical substance over pose could easily line up at the counter of a record shop and start fiercely haggling down the price, and we’d have pretty weighty arguments for it. To sum up: At All Cost have become victims of the principle by which, in modern times, a lack of guts is covered up with cosmetic touch-ups. This time, the facade of their musical house got just three tons of badly measured and utterly unaesthetic shades of computer wizardry, which smothers even the last speck of promising musical glow. Musicality gave way to business prostitution. That takes talent too, right?