album review ! :3
blessthefall - his last walk (2007)
xxherlastwalkxx 10/17/2023
you'll never believe where the name of my website came from.
yeah this album is awesome and i'm a big fan. i can't say i'm an expert in metalcore, but blessthefall is easily my favorite metalcore band. this whole album has that wonderful emo tint over it, which unfortunately a lot of metalcore bands (especially modern metalcore) don't really have. metalcore is a strange genre to me, i feel that what makes it special among lots of heavier music is its dynamicness, which can give certain projects a unique sort of emotion. it's weird to me when bands will sound super heavy and super aggressive and then out of nowhere there's a shiny little pop-four-chords chorus. what blessthefall does really well on his last walk is the way they bridge their heavier influences with "softer," more conventionally emotive musical ideas. it's not just a "screamy verses singy choruses" kind of album which unfortunately seems pretty common.
part of this dynamicness is the fluidity of structure and color in each song. sure, there are still "choruses" and "verses," but the songwriting is still free. if anything, these more conventional structures hold the rest of the song in place and keeps the writing from drifting aimlessly. this is also helped by the instrumentation of the band. the two guitars aren't simply the same part doubletracked, they both split off from each other and decorate the arrangement. the combination of craig's main vocals and jared's backup is very important to the way the album sounds. personally, i'm a big fan of the singing style, even if it didn't age super well. and, singing aside, both vocalists' screams compliment each other really well. i love that they don't stray away from giving jared his own little section where it would have been easy to just give the part to "the lead vocalist" just because he's "the lead vocalist."
the tracklist is also relatively varied, which i greatly appreciate. one complaint that i have with a lot of heavier music (and even blessthefall's other albums) is that every song is always super loud and it's kind of just noise until maybe they spare you a little bit and give you a quieter song as the album closes. even "with eyes wide shut," which could be described as an interlude track, is still a good song. it's not just "something else for a while so we can get back to the real stuff." also. "wait for tomorrow" is just one of the best songs i've ever heard. it's so emo. the tempo changes are, for lack of a better word, really cool. and likewise with the fluidity between screaming and singing in the slower sections. awesome songwriting.
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