Artist: Rise To Remain
Label: EMI Records
Release: 2011
Length: 45:25
Rating: 4/5
You really have to be something special when you’re doing metal to get EMI Records to put a contract in front of you. Rise To Remain have only put out their debut this year, but the band has actually been around for five years, and its members already cut their teeth in other outfits before that. The five-piece has gone at the whole thing with serious ambition, and they’ve got a solid platform to back that ambition up with real moves. They started building their international profile with the release of their third EP “Bridges Will Burn” last year, and the music press, Kerrang! and Metal Hammer included, crowned them “newcomers of 2011”! This year brings a cathartic joint tour with Iron Maiden, which unmistakably reflects the fateful impact of the father-son bond between Bruce and Austin Dickinson, and it’s fair to say that, with the debut in their pocket, Rise To Remain are now a tightly saddled young crew that has it all. Ambition, good management and a high profile right from the very start of their career, which will not only keep them afloat with this release but throw the creative doors wide open for them to spread their name even further. And they’re doing it with musical quality.
What Rise To Remain play makes no secret of the approach of bands like Bullet For My Valentine and Trivium. But you can also trace the roots a bit further back into the past, and in places the band’s arrangement structures link them to classic Iron Maiden. So we can say that Rise To Remain are basically card-carrying members of the “metal core” genre, yet they manage to build strikingly dynamic song structures with a plot that stays interesting the whole way through. A major factor in all this is of course the vocal talent of Bruce Jr., who picked up plenty of pointers under the watchful tutelage of his famous father. Detailed comparisons between the band and Iron Maiden, or between the two singers, aren’t exactly in order, but still, if you compare the production of classic Iron Maiden with the modern sound of Rise To Remain, and picture Bruce at the vocal peak of his “dewy” 26 years, at the release of “The Number Of The Beast”, transported into a new era, he’d probably sound very much like his son Austin does on Rise To Remain’s debut in the melodic, clean vocal passages. Today’s production sinks the vocals into the riff-heavy embrace of the souped-up guitars far more firmly than was typical in the eighties, so Austin doesn’t push his vocals so far to the front in the mix.
From Iron Maiden they’ve also inherited the harmonies in thirds and the typical structural solutions for individual transitional and outro passages, while guitarist Ben Tovey often stuns with an exceptionally polished guitar technique, with extreme speed and clarity in his soloing. The lightning-fast, tear-clear arpeggios follow a pure neo-classical principle, which the band also cleverly exploits in its arrangements with plenty of compatibly built-in melodic passages that sit above the lead guitar phrases, while Ben serves up one killer solo after another across the songs. On top of that, the band switches between different rhythmic textures, more and less demanding structures, with great skill and effect, so that the high dynamic flow of this album isn’t broken at a single point of its running time. Rise To Remain often combine the modern “metalcore” principle, with its dizzying “break-s” in venomous riffing through the verses, with a switch of atmosphere in the chorus, which is built in classic heavy metal style. In that respect you can find quite a few parallels to this approach in bands like Trivium (Nothing Left), while Power Through Fear (with a “groove” that new bands today can only dream of) even touches on elements of black metal in the verse phrasing, like old Cradle Of Filth, and This Day Is Mine earns a comparison with Bullet For My Vallentine. Unlike the “emo” vocal slips of Trivium and Bullet For My Valentine, you’ve got nothing like that to worry about with Rise To Remain. The album loses some of its dynamite towards the end with the run of the more simply built Nothing Left and We Will Last Forever right after it, as well as the calmer Roads, but otherwise it impresses from start to finish with its lively, varied sharpness. And it does so on the strength of ideas that are entirely its own!
Austin combines ultra-melodic pomp (The Serpentine, City Of Vultures, God Can Bleed), which he embodies effectively mostly in catchy melodic choruses, with a mix of metalcore screaming and death growls, backed by fitting support and intensification from deliberate studio “distortion” and the latest fashionable production, handled by the seasoned Colin Richardson (Trivium, Cradle Of Filth, Bullet For My Valentine, Slipknot, Machine Head) and Carl Bown.
“City Of Vultures” is a very good debut from a young, ambitious band that has successfully laid the foundation stone in every respect, one that firmly offers the five-piece a springboard for their future creative exploits. “City Of Vultures” delivers a full bag of excellent (modern-minded!) arrangements (The Serpentine, Bridges Will Burn, Power Through Fear, City Of Vultures), which admittedly doesn’t hide a few reserves at certain less inspired points (Roads, Nothing Left, We Will Last Forever), in terms of building up the consistency of future releases. Still, this is an album that, even as a studio debut, outclasses many new releases in the genre it occupies, which means we can expect plenty more exciting things from Rise To Remain in the future.
Lineup
Austin Dickinson – vocals
Ben Tovey – guitar, backing vocals
Will Homer – guitar, backing vocals
Joe Copcutt – bass
Pat Lundy – drums
Production
Colin Richardson & Carl Bown
Tracklist
1. Intro
2. The Serpent
3. This Day Is Mine
4. City of Vultures
5. Talking in Whispers
6. God Can Bleed
7. Power Through Fear
8. Nothing Left
9. We Will Last Forever
10. Illusions
11. Roads
12. Bridges Will Burn
