Review Summary: Hollow Crown this is not.
It seems trivial really, comparing a new album to the band’s “seminal” work, a gag if you will, that most if not all reviews (and reviewers for that matter) have to use every once in a while, but when the band in question is Architects and the seminal work is Hollow Crown, it’s almost a necessity to do so, seeing how to most people Hollow Crown is the apex of the sound that Architects is known for.
Yet here we are, 3 years on after the dismal misstep that was “The Here and Now” and the luke-warm reception to “Daybreaker” and Architects can’t wait to distance themselves as far away as possible from their “post-Crown” work, but even so, something is not quite whole here, the riffs are there, the impressive vocals courtesy of Sam Carter are also there (with added range for emotion and melodies sake if I may add) the use of electronic passages like the bridge of Broken Cross is also here, so why does it seem like this is if anything a compromise between their most caustic work and their present more radio-friendly incarnation?
In reality I couldn’t say, it’s pretty clear that after Daybreaker the band put on their collective thinking caps on and decided to produce the most visceral album they could this side of 2010 while still dragging on the weight of their desire to produce a more radio friendly sound, it´s this that seems to be
Lost Forever // Lost Together’s biggest flaw, its disjointed and it lacks focus, gone is the cathartic energy of the first half of hollow crown to be replaced with the slow burning aggression of 3 way combo Gravedigger (by far one of the albums best cuts) Naysayer and Broken Cross, and while the latter half of the album is stellar to say the least (Youth is Wasted on The Young shows the beast of a front man that Carter is) it still lacks most of the replay value that their predecessors did (I’m looking at you Ruin).
Despite the somewhat harsh criticism, this is a good album with really enjoyable musical moments and a beastly performance by Sam Carter, yet it’s as if they refuse to push the extra mile that we all know they are capable of, so for now don’t call it a comeback… at-least not yet.
