Albums

Album Review: Misery Signals

[Album: Controller]
[Label: Ferret Music]

Misery Signals once took the extraordinary decision to find a new vocalist by putting an instrumental song up on their MySpace and invite folk to record their own vocals over the top and mail them in. They ended up selecting Karl Schubach from the many that responded and have, amazingly, found new strength in his colossal vocal style. They successfully married it to the heavy riffs and melodic breakdowns of their subsequent release, 2006’s ‘Mirrors’, and haven’t looked back since, touring ever bigger venues and amassing a gigantic fan base from which to launch themselves from. This new album has been eagerly awaited by many and it doesn’t disappoint.

Crushing double-kick teams up with lumbering basslines to create a bubbling pot from which the guitars rise out with an effortless energy. There is no doubting that Schubach’s still sounding angry and like the ugly ogre in the stereotyped bedtime fairtytale he’s here to scare the living daylights out of any unsuspecting passer-by. Trip trap, trip trap. Mighty guttural roars on ‘Nothing’ are topped by the scorched vocals that he rips out on ‘Weight Of The World’. “As the embers rise / I’ll be at the bottom / when it all comes down / I’ll carry the weight of the world / strapped to my back”, he bellows as if it were the final cry of a convicted man facing the chair.

The complementary stringwork here shatters any illusions that this is all mouth and no trousers - check out the glorious arpeggio hook on ‘Labyrinthian’ or the crawling brilliance of the interweaving riffs on ‘Parallels’. On this latter track, however, the limitations of Schubach’s monotone delivery becomes the “Achilles heel” of the album. There is also a tendency to overegg the death-edged intensity of it (’Set In Motion’ and ‘Reset’).

Look harder and you’ll also find a certain familiarity in the generic patterns that start to appear - ‘A Certain Death’ and ‘Ebb And Flow’ hark back to early Crazyfists and Killswitch-a-like intensely riffed passages that come with each breakdown. Thankfully, there are moments of true class here and the aforementioned ‘Reset’ has more to offer than just a good battering and instead provides a warming, and sensitive two-minute drop out to take us gliding into the gripping finale, ‘Homecoming’.

An album of many faces then (and with Devin Townsend at the production desk should we have expected anything else). The toothy smile is perhaps slipping, the scowl becoming tiresome, but still the result is impressive, if not entirely fulfilling. Misery Signals are standing at a crossroads yet again. Has Schubach got another level in him, or do they need to post another instrumental?

For fans of: Parkway Drive, Unearth, Killswitch Engage
Band link = Misery Signals

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