Look at that album I title. I mean. I’m gonna take the bait.
Engine Down: post-hardcore screamy emo-ness to shatter your soul, direct from the Lovitt stable, erstwhile home of the equally discouraging Four Hundred Years. Spread over these 8 songs is a whole lot of creative originality ready to set your head spinning and your body shuddering. Speak, sing, shout, scream, Engine Down shuttle you from subtly delicious Van Pelt isms to full on head pounding emo destruction, oft within just a singular effort and certainly without concern for your health … Introductory song “Castalia” will have you flailing and falling all around from one moment to the next … “Slingshot” induces doubling over as you shake it down to the tidal groove that they work on up, and wind on down, before sliding into the finale, replete with instruments being looped backwards and backwards in some kind of crazy emo drum’n’bass dancefloor weird out – an early-rising Christopher Leo will probably spill his cup of coffee in bewilderment when hearing “Brushes” on the breakfast radio show for the first time, briefly trying to recall if he ever laid down a track with a band called Engine Down, before returning to the morning paper and ‘Nod a long … Minimalism, obvious bass, and cello add so much to the blissful soundtrack to the slow drive home towards the perfectly elongated sunset of “Colorado” then “The Offer Of Something” before the descent into bleak screaming begins with it’s finale and the proceeding swift blast of “Nearsighted” … and it all winds to an end with the epic proportions of “Dare Devil”, sending you tumbling to the floor amidst the swaying guitars, ensuring you stay there with a strategically placed piano and cello tandem that pushes the album on to it’s end.
More essential smash-it-up emo for the not so happy, 400 Years listeners, 12 Hour Turn acolytes. Or all three at once preferably. You got it? I have.