When San Diego Music Award's 2006 Artist of the Year and MTV Metal Gods 2006 Awardee As I Lay Dying (AILD) release an album (their 3rd with Metal Blade Records), you can be dead sure the album is going be a classic. Released in August this year, ”An Ocean Between Us (AOBU)” is a bar-raiser for many reasons. This album is brutally heavy, lyrically diverse and musically superior to a lot of recent albums put out by bands within the same sub-genre. It is the kind of album that you would never expect of a metalcore band whose genre is synonymous with typical breakdownladen chugga-chugga sounds.
The album starts off with an instrumental Separation which fades into a monster of a song Nothing Left. It has got to be the best track of the album with killer riffing and thunderous double-bass drumming. The next track “An Ocean Between Us is a reflection of the musical capabilities of the band and their experiments with sounds outside of their genre. Throughout the album, AILD keeps shifting with ease from pure metal songs (Comfort Betrays/Within Destruction) to emotionally-charged (I Never Wanted) and melodious ones (Forsaken/The Sound of Truth). The album ends with “Wrath Upon Ourselves and “This Is Who We Are, two tightly-knit metal tracks. Apart from solid drumming and the twin-guitar attack, the back-up vocals of Josh Gilbert (bassist) and the studio direction of Adam Dutkiewicz (guitarist, Killswitch Engage) are the highlights of this unique album.
This album has got to be one of the top 10 metal albums of 2007. Highly recommended.
