Fear Before The March of Flames - Odd How People Shake

Now that hardcore and hardcore derivatives have gained a level of popularity approaching “mass appeal,” it’s time to start getting critical of bands involved. Isn’t that how it works? You get slapped with a shiny new tag that places you easily within a nutshell of a three word hyphenated term, making you all that much easier to flick off the knee of grandpa metal, soon to be crushed on the hardwood bar floor. It’s easier to hit a target when you can contain it. Fear Before the March of Flames’ Odd How People Shake, without being anything entirely original, somehow manages to escape the aforementioned trap. How does a screamo (oops, there - I did it) band who wears its influences all over its face get away with this? Follow along, I’ll tell you how. • They manage to pull off multiple vocal styles. The vocals will often make or break an album like this, and this time around it gets made. At any given point you may hear a scream, a shout or a wail; sometimes you’ll hear all three at once (throughout “The 20th Century was Entirely Mine”, for instance). Fear Before flip this from a negative to a positive by not falling back on any of the styles as a crutch. And it helps when they all sound good on their own merits. You’ll no doubt be reminded of Converge’s Jake Bannon and The Mars Volta’s Cedric Bixler Zavala along the way. This is a good thing. • They manage to pull off eight-minutes of un-adorned piano. Too much piano, especially in this context, can have a disastrous effect. Eight straight minutes of it has been known to kill. But here, because it is used only in the short outro to “Given to Dreams,” at the tail end of the 12-minute finale “What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas,” it harms no one. In fact, the end of “What Happens…” stands on its own as a very well executed musical piece. The stark contrast it creates gives the album sonic texture, something all to rare within this genre. • It managed to turn me around. The first few times I played it through, I didn’t much care for it. By about the 5th spin, it was a completely different album. Any album worth its weight in anything seems to take this path to my favor. By revealing itself slowly, it has become a much more compelling piece of work. The good ones do this. Odd How People Shake isn’t without its down spots (the first four minutes of “What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas” and the over-repetitive “Sarah Goldfarb, Where are Your Manners”) and all of its working parts have been done by someone else before, but the album’s non-stop motion and shifty nature save it from the post-hardcore scrap heap. It hits on some pretty touchy areas, so chances are if you don’t like it you’ll hate it, but if you’re a gambler, I’d recommend rolling the dice on these guys. [www.marchofflames.com]