Review Summary: Counterparts rid the youthful melodramatic crutches of previous efforts and show their teeth in a gritty and emotional fashion that outshines their contemporaries in almost every aspect.
Counterparts have always been a unique band for me to recall. Their mix of late 90’s influenced metalcore with the emo/screamo influences of bands like Touche Amore and Defeater fuse some fairly ordinary genres into an actually decently unique project. They sport absolutely beautiful lead melodies coupled with a pulsingly emotional (yet still mind-breakingly heavy) rhythm section that annihilate anything recent from their contemporaries. And that’s just how I felt about them from previous impressions on the phenomenally crafted
The Difference Between Hell and Home and even 2015’s somewhat inferior
Tragedy Will Find Us. With their shortest record to date, Counterparts absolutely blow every expectation out of water and have wrapped their baseball bats in nails for the phenomenally constructed introspection that lies within
You’re Not You Anymore.
With a lot of the instrumentation on
You’re Not You Anymore, Counterparts take their usual formulas of emotional buildups into heavy climaxes etc and absolutely amplify every variable to the highest of their abilities. The choruses are infinitely more canorous, the vocals are more emotional, the rhythmics are as heavy and intensely compact as ever, the guitars are tenfold more creative than they were on previous efforts, and Brendan Murphy’s vocal performance shames those given on past efforts. All of this is also perfectly complimented by the astounding production that definitely throws it back to
TDBHAH with the cleaner instrumentation and the gritty unadulterated savagery within vocalist Brendan Murphy’s self meditation. All these aspects only further the maturity and honest self reflection the band explores on
You’re Not You Anymore.
Even the lyrical content displayed by Murphy, which is arguably the band’s most immature aspect, has garnered some steadfast improvements with Murphy toning down the melodramatics (at least a little bit) or at least getting infinitely more creative with his outcries akin to songs like the monumental closer “Solace” off of
Tragedy Will Find Us. Songs like “A Memory Misread” or “Rope” take fairly intense and mildly dramatic subjects and Murphy is able to curve his words to make these topics
actually interesting in context to his contemporaries with lines like
“Separate me from a finished product like needle and thread // Translating words to portray the vacant pages they live in // A requiem worshipped for the pauses it contains // Praising not the essence but the meaningless remain” or
“Promises I have disowned appear before me // Resembling the outline of my soul // Unravel me, every sentence makes me sick // Bound and abandoned by a noose that lifts me off my feet // Hanging like a halo overhead, I knew your rope was made for me” that leaves a haunting and intense view into Brendan Murphy’s eyes that I can’t help but see my reflection sometimes when I look from them.
It’s with all of this refinement that Counterparts have taken into consideration when making
You’re Not You Anymore that makes it such an incredible step-up for the band. They cut out a lot of the unnecessary fat that used to lay within their sound whether it be uncreative melodrama in their lyrical content, or mindless breakdowns that kill the structure of songs, Counterparts really have cultivated their sound into a whole new beast and if they continue to do so, or even just to take another step in the post-metal influenced title track closer, they could easily come out with a modern masterpiece worthy of an unmistakably concrete classic rating. The only question now we can propose for the band is, with all of these refinements of their previous sound; where do they go from here? Where
could they go from here?
