Review Summary: It's different, so it should be looked at from a different perspective than that of their previous work.
Over the years, Parkway Drive has become one of the kings of the metalcore/hardcore genres. The band established itself with its first two albums with brutal breakdowns, arguably the best vocalist in the game, and riffing that grabbed the listener by the throat and did not relinquish its vice grip. However, over the years a sneaking suspicion has crept into the fanbase, leading many people to think that Parkway had reached a plateau. After a while, even though the music was still blood-pumping and very recognizable, the songs, at least for me, began to sound like the same old same old. Atlas did feature maturity, but it was not a total game changer. On the other hand, for better or for worse, the new album Ire, is.
The best way to listen to this album is to first consider what the title actually means. As many of you probably know already, Ire simply means anger. In terms of Parkway Drive's previous music, ire would probably mean, well, what they have already done repeatedly. Therefore, prior to the release of the singles, many of us probably assumed that the album would be the same as the past. However, with the release of Vice Grip, that assumption was immediately proven wrong. The track instantly denotes a shift in the band's sound by utilizing rock, instead of hardcore, guitar sounds, oh-oh-ohs, and a more bright and triumphant chorus. To be frank, I was not sure what to think when the song was first put on Youtube. And my confusion was not helped by the release of Crushed, a song featuring nu-metalesque guitars and spoken vocals followed up by a brutal, albeit, simple, chorus. In short, I was not extremely excited going into the album.
Obviously, by now the album has dropped, and we all have had time to process the change that it has brought for Parkway. To summarize, Ire takes a turn down the memory lane of 80s rock/metal, forays into quasi-clean vocals, spoken word, verse-chorus-verse structure on may of the tracks. This basket of aspects is honestly the most experimentation that the band has ever done. Moreover, they take some of these aspects, and fuse them together with tracks that bring back memories of their earlier sound. The change must have taken some guts for the band, and I do have to commend them for taking the leap. However, no matter how much a band changes from being semi-stagnant, the effort really does not matter if the end product is not good, so the the most important question to ask is whether the band actually succeeds in creating something that is both a change and of good quality.
Well, in the end I think so. Vice Grip grew on me with its chorus that just made feel courageous, and Crushed turned out to be a heck of a ride too. The song alternates from eeriness to catchy brutality, and the combination is great. The band finds more success with the new format on Fractures and Deathless Song, and it backs them up with more hard-hitting tracks like Dedicated, which has a breakdown at the end which plainly gets the hype train going. Dying to Believe is similar to Crushed in that its chorus is much more hard-hitting than that of its peers. Unfortunately, the new approach does not always succeed. Bottom Feeder is just not exciting enough, and Destroyer just seems like a weaker version of Vice Grip; the same goes for Vicious. Writings on the Wall is just so different with spoken word almost the time and a strange beat in the background that I can't say if it is the worst or the best thing ever.
On my first full listen, I was almost overwhelmed by how good I thought the album was. But after another listen, I realize that the greatness of the majority of the tracks blinded me from some of the album's flaws. The foray into verse-chorus-verse style becomes tiresome and redundant eventually, and at times, the lack of true cutting guitars and energy irks me. Still, the success of their new ideas outnumbers its failures, and as a whole Ire turns out to be a good start into a new era of Parkway Drive.
