After three songs with a kind of ‘been there, heard that’ feeling, the fourth song, "Skies Dressed in Black," throws a curveball at the listener. The Hardcore vocals yield to a whiny singing voice that invokes Blink 182 or worse, The Deftones. Thankfully this passage was short, but it still did not sit well with this reviewer. Points were earned for using an unanticipated shift in sound, but this is clearly not one of the band’s strengths.

Checking out Destiny online elsewhere, it was reported that the title 'The Tracy Chapter' was named for a very personal period of life for someone in the band. Regardless, the self-claimed "emotional, catchy and aggressive" soundscapes are present throughout the album. The music is an almost by-the-numbers Hardcore affair with Metal fluorishes, fusing crunching riffs with pounding drums, but the vocals may very well be the primary focus. As with the 4th song, again on "Revival of April" are some clean vocals that would not be out of place on an Emo record. "Naunyn Street" sees more of this vocal accentuation and "The Admiration of Sadness" is punctuated with some of the same, but as a whole, the clean vocal parts are all rather brief on this record.

The final track on the album, "Kiss Us Goodbye," is a strange sort of beast, being virtually unlike the bulk of this album. The song opens with clean guitar [think acoustic strumming], giving way to a mid-paced rock vibe, which is then followed by actual singing which later offers yelling buried beneath a wall-of-sound guitar counter melody. This could have been from another album or recorded during a different session, but it is an interesting piece, aside from the radio squeaks and squawks that appear near the end of the song which ultimately fades out in drowning white noise.

Without tripping all over the subgenres within the context of Metalcore / Hardcore, this is a solid album from a group that could fit in on a lot of different tour packages. Old school Metalheads and certainly Death Metalheads will not get this brand of music, but this is an album rife with dynamic, punishing sounds. Destiny must paint a pretty good picture because American Hardcore label of legend, Victory Records, picked up the band for U.S. distribution. While perhaps a little long in the tooth at 44:07, the strong parts of this album are so much stronger than the weak parts are weak. This is what I imagine Atreyu aspires to sound or be like, though that band should just put away their makeup.

written by Tony Belcher

Playing time: 44.07