Review Summary: More emotional than a teenage girl after she hears that The Jonas brothers have broken up, and catchier than the plague........
When I found out from Scott (Mclatchie, Guitar, Lead Vocals) that they were recording a new demo, I was awfully exited, consider how much I enjoyed their earlier material. One thing which really caught my attention was when he said that he would be writing a different style this time, starting off fresh. He said that it would be in the direction of Midwestern emo/screamo, a style that I was not too familiar with to be honest. I was worried, their older post hardcore approach worked so well for them, so why give it up?
Several months later, I went to check my bands myspace, and all of a sudden I see in the comments a message from World at a glance saying ‘Hey dudes, we’ve finished our demo, come check it out!’ Straight away when I see that message, I go onto their myspace, and I see three new tracks. I started listening to ‘Summer songs’, and to tell you the truth, I was a bit shocked. I came on thinking it would be another post hardcore song, just slightly influenced by Midwestern screamo, and got a song that could have been a ‘Merchant Ships’ cover. I was confused, I listened to the whole demo twice, but I still couldn’t get my head around their new direction.
After quite a few more listens, I got used to it, and started finding ‘the beauty amongst the chaos’ so to speak. The demo opens with
Summer Songs; the song starts off with the guitar fading in, then a nice clean riff, after a few seconds of that, Scott starts screaming and shrieking:
This is my weapon,
I’ve marked my disguises
This is what threw me off the most, Scott’s new vocals. I was so used to his sort of half sing/half yell vocals (think Cedrick Bixler-Zavala people), Now it seems that he was screaming his f***ing lunges out. Not that that was bad at all, just seemed a bit out of place to me.
The song has a crescendo and the verse starts. On my first listen I actually thought this part was the chorus, because it was THAT catchy. The chorus comes, and I must say, this is probably my favourite part of the whole demo; the band shouts outs ‘
WE… WILL… DIE!!! While Scott follows that
With the same f***ing songs in our heart
The rest of the song Is repetition of just a slightly altered bridge or something, and the song ends similar to the intro, but building down.
Counting down is not at all similar to
Summer songs, it starts of loudly, and has a bit more of an upbeat feeling to it than the rest of the album. Lots of fills by the drummer, which is nice, some random samples (which I have NO clue where they’re from). Though the music may be upbeat; the lyrics on the other hand, are rather hateful and depressing.
I wish I could hate you
For everything, that you’ve done
I wish that I could blame you
But I cant
This song pretty much represents World at a glance’s style altogether. No flashy solos(not that there is any really in modern screamo anyway), no real repetition, no f***ing around, the just get to the point in the most effective way, and don’t do anything unnecessary like drag songs out with unneeded repeats and unnecessary solos that don’t work with the song.
The next song (and the last song I might add),
Inside jokes, starts off with a great riff, and marching-style snare focused drum beat and Scott sounding as emotional as ever, delivering the most beautiful lyrics:
I sometimes lay awake at night, waiting for my dreams
To wake up the next day, and hoping that I‘ll see
Everything is back to normal, everything is as it was
but I will never see this day
This is followed by quite an anthem-like chorus, that was stuck in my head for hours afterwards. The song ends abruptly, and left me wanting more…..
Pros
Summer Songs is amazingly good
Very emotional screaming
Bass is nice and audible
Solid drumming
Melodic and catchy riffs
Cons
No individual standouts by the members really….
Isn’t the greatest production-wise
But through all this, they are doing nothing really new, nothing overly special, if you were to be looking to get into screamo, I’m sure I could come up with many, many other bands to listen to. Although it is nothing fresh or innovative, it is simply GOOD. World at a glance can show that they are very good at what they do, so it doesn’t really matter that they aren’t doing anything ground-breaking. If you are a legit screamo/emo fan, then I would definitely recommend you downloading this(coz you cant buy it), its only like 7 minutes or something, so check it out, and it probably wont disappoint.
(btw, this is my first review, so don’t go to hard on me!(hahaha I said hard on) positive criticism appreciated!!)
