PlanetMosh Keeping it Metal
This fifth full-length release from US metalcore mob Hawthorne Heights is billed as a concept album, based around the usual storyline (although admittedly one more often narrated by power metal outfits) about post-apocalyptic world/dystopian future where a totalitarian corporation has risen to overarching power and the ‘little man’ starts to fight back.
To be honest, I can’t really read the storyline in what is basically a collection of teenager-friendly pretty poppy-punky anthems (with a couple of ballads thrown in for good measure) which remind this reviewer of a lighter 30 Seconds To Mars (perhaps not a supremely surprising comparison, given 30STM collaborator Brian Virtue’s collaboration on production duties) mixed with touches of just about every other act in this sub-genre you care to name.
It’s well played and produced, thoughtfully constructed and there are a few decent hooks, but while ‘Zero’ doesn’t appeal to a hardened old metaller such as myself, this is as decenta stab, if not slightly more ambitious in its concept, at this particular genre as I have heard in the recent past.
Tracklist:
- Skeletons Remain (Transmission 1)
- Memories of Misery
- Darkside
- Spark
- Zero
- Anywhere But Here
- Hollow Hearts Unite
- Coalition Of Alternate Living Methods (Broadcast)
- Golden Parachutes
- Put Me Back Together
- Strangers
- 12. Ghost Town
- Lost In The Calm
- 14. Taken By The Dark
- Over And Out (Transmission 2)
‘Zero’ is out now on Red Entertainment.
