Wednesday, January 26, 2011

This City Sunrise - 2009 Sings In Unison [EP]


Band : This City Sunrise
Album : This City Sunrise
Release Year : 2007
Genre : Post-Hardcore / Progressive / Experimental

Tracklist:
1) Weird Concrete Building
2) Pretty Much...
3) Hansel & Gretel
4) Duke Nukem Forever
5) You've Got To Be Fuckin' Kidding
 
This City Sunrise’s latest offering, This City Sunrise Sings in Unison, feels like a hybrid of These Arms Are Snakes,The Blood Brothers, and a bit of Daughters. The guitar riffs are technical, eccentric in their rhythm and time, and have a groovy background of bass lines to play off of. The band combines musical technicality, constantly varying the rhythm and time signature, with a wide variety of vocal techniques, making for an overall solid release.
The opener, “Weird Concrete Buildings," kicks off the album with a math-core beat down, which quickly and seamlessly transitions into another mathy, yet more These Arms Are Snakes-like, groovy slower section. Right away you get a feel for TCS’s sound, constantly changing things up between heavy, mellow and groovy, with dual vocals combining shouting, singing, and screaming. “Pretty Much…” sounds reminiscent of older At The Drive-In, but with more of an atmospheric feel. “Hansel & Gretel” is TCS at the heavier end of their spectrum, with more screaming and some heavy jams that will have you banging your head against the wall. There is also a chorus-like section which provides some structure to the track, but doesn’t compromise their experimental writing style. In one of the best titled tracks I have seen in recent years, “Duke Nukem Forever,” the band transitions between thrashy math core and rock and roll sections, with some of the vocals sounding similar to Keith Buckley from ETID. The album’s closer, “You’ve Got To Be Fuckin’ Kidding,” features some riddler-style lyrics (“Knowledge is power and we are a mouse, chasing survival within a toy house”), and ends with a chaotic hardcore breakdown to finish things off in a powerful fashion.
You’ll have to excuse my excessive use of comparisons here (These Arms Are Snakes, The Blood Brothers, Daughters, At the Drive In, Everytime I Die), as This City Sunrise do have a unique a style and are in no way attempting to imitate the bands mentioned above. It’s the eccentricity of the music that requires me to draw tiny influences from multiple bands to help give you a feel for what TCS is all about.
Just ask yourself - “Is a band that combines the styles of These Arms Are Snakes, At The Drive In, The Blood Brothers, and Daughters, something I would enjoy listening to?” Unless you’re completely crazy, the answer should be yes, and the right thing to do would be to check these guys out. On October 9th, 2008, they filmed their “farewell to New Zealand” show in HD and had all the sound engineered to CD production clarity. All of the videos are up on their Myspace and are definitely worth checking out. 
 
 
 
 
 

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