Review Summary: Powerful, precise, and perfect.
I make no doubts about it, I love metalcore. Back when I was fifteen, bands like Botch, Coalesce, and Deadguy pushed my own personal boundaries on what I considered punk at the time. Being born in the 80's in southern California made it so I was on the front lines when punk “broke”, but where the bands that I was introduced to by my neighbors and their older brothers as a kid like Minor Threat and Rancid carved their visions out of a handful of simple chords, The Dillinger Escape Plan and Drowningman crafted tomes out of fury and dissonance. As the genre evolved and changed from Boston's noisiest to Boston's most melodic in the early 2000's, the exploding cavalcade of time changes, tritones, and two note nails-across-chalkboard noises pretty much disappeared with the exception of a couple last hanger-ons. Even now, in the age where every forgotten trend of someone's youth is making a comeback, the style is still only barely surviving. Mainstays like Converge are going more and more into His Hero Is Gone crust territory, KEN Mode are building more and more on their noise rock influences than their hardcore ones, and Gaza is... well, lets not talk about that.
That is why I am so enamored with the latest record from Seizures. Where the band in the past kept their off the walls antics reigned in,
The Sanity Universal unleashes the floodgates. The result is a pure throwback to all things heavy, discordant, and ugly that sounds ripped straight out of my teenage years.
The Sanity Universal is built on constantly shifting ground, and Seizures move every which way in line with its foundation. Every riff is a smack in the face with a fretboard on fire. It churns its way across frenetic fills, d-beat drumming, buzzsaw diminished runs, and more acrobatic hammer-ons than what Botch packed into their entire discography. It's a beautiful and calculated mess; an auditory train wreck in the best of ways. “Suicide Support Hotline” grooves just as hard as anything Coalesce managed to concoct during their original heyday, “Kansas” builds on both the metal tinged chaos of The Red Chord's debut as well as the atmospheric decay that turned Cave In into a household name outside of just the hardcore scene, and “Ante Meridiem” out-
We Are the Romans Botch at their own game. It's f
ucking glorious.
Plain and simple there has been no metalcore, mathcore, noisecore, whatever the heck you want to call it record this stunning since before James Dewees was wasting his talent on the side of the stage at My Chemical Romance concerts.
The Sanity Universal is, without a doubt, something we're going to be looking back on in ten years with reverence and awe. It's powerful, precise, and, well, perfect. To put it bluntly, it's a classic.
