The Autumn Offering – Fear Will Cast No Shadow
Victory Records (10/30/07)
Metal
There’s this new “sound” prevalent on the metal scene these days: the music with an old-school metal feel, that incorporates a newer hard-rock sound, with vocals more akin to Axl Rose or James Hetfield, than the usual death/hardcore stuff on which the heavier bands are relying. And don’t forget plenty of guitar solos.
Somewhere between Trivium, Atreyu and Avenged Sevenfold lies The Autumn Offering. And while the aforementioned groups are getting all the attention, there’s really no reason The Autumn Offering isn’t right up there in the mix. In fact, the band has one thing going for it that the others don’t—it still has a raw edge to the music that gives it this air of dangerousness.
On Fear Will Cast No Shadow, the band’s full array of talent is on show. There’s the technically proficient guitar work permeating “The Castaway” (one of the year’s best metal songs, hands down), the insanely catchy vocals on “Silence and Goodbye”, which is eerily reminiscent of Trivium’s “Dying in Your Arms”, and the melody twisted around a metallic core on “A Great Distance” is fantastic.
But while the band does a good job with the melody and straightforward metal, it’s just as comfortable with the more extreme ends of its sound. Even with the deathly growls on “A Great Distance,” the straight-forward assault on “Crown Yourself a King, Kill Yourself a Queen,” or the rapid-fire title track, nothing is so out of left field that it sounds out of place. Suffice it to say that that is a massive problem for a lot of bands attempting this type of juxtaposition (usually leading to the abandoning of one of the angles in the mix).
This isn’t the most original release of the year, but it puts The Autumn Offering on the high end of the spectrum for bands with a similar sound. Fear Will Cast No Shadow is a solid release, end-to-end, sure to make fans happy and earn plenty of new ones, too.
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