Nights Like These – Sunlight at Secondhand
Victory Records (10/16/07)
Metal
Victory Records would have you believe Nights Like These is a genre-bending metal outfit, but the truth is band has a perfect, raw, atypical underground metal band feel to its music. And that’s nothing of which to be ashamed.
The band comes across as an obscure, everyman aggressive outfit. The metal is thick, heavy and assaulting. The guitar is chunky, the drumming relentless, the vocals seething. And when the band goes for the hardcore breakdown, like on “Black the Sun”, it throws in the slightest amount of melodic singing to temper things.
The high points are definitely here. There’s a blistering machine-gun assault on “Samsara”. The melodic closing of “Claw Your Way Out” shows the band has a little depth to the full-on metal attack, as does the instrumental curveball “Collective Unconscious”. The band utilizes an interesting guitar effect on more than one occasion to close out a song (sort-of-high-pitched riffing) that’s another interesting departure to the norm.
The only real negative is that the constant metal/hardcore attack becomes tiresome at times. This is especially perplexing given the various tools the band has to work with on display throughout the album. Whether that means mixing up the play list or incorporating a more diverse approach to each song, I’m not sure. So there are times when the songs feel like they’re droning on a little too long, even though they’re only four minutes long.
Sunlight at Secondhand would be a stronger offering if the band had picked a direction. Either keeping with the heavy-handed metal onslaught, or choosing to incorporate an abundance of style to each track. This in the middle approach only leaves those on each side of the fence wanting more. In the end, the band crafted a good release that could be better.
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