Review Summary: A band with a huge amount of talent decides to make a talentless, uninspired and above all generic album.
One of the most dangerous moments in a bands life are line-up changes, especially if these involve the vocalist as we’re never sure what will happen to the sound we came to love. However we have seen such changes work out great, just look at bands like
Underoath or
Norma Jean, but we’ve also seen it go wrong in bands like
Saosin. But never was the impact of a single man changing so big as with a band called “
The Paramedic”.
The Paramedic is a quintet hailing from Dayton, Ohio and exists out of the following members;
- Michael Luciano - Vocals
- Jake Nolan - Guitar
- Travis Adkins - Bass
- Matt Allan - Guitar
- Tony Hovater - Drums
The Paramedic is one such band that had to change their vocalist but that’s not all that’s new, sadly. Before I get to the nasty parts and ugly details I would like to mention that Michael is debatable a step up from their earlier vocalist Brady. Michael sounds a lot like Tyler Carter from
Woe, Is Me, featuring the same soulful voice and an insane vocal range that would even send Jonny Craig from
Emarosa home crying. His growls aren’t that bad either, Sure they’re just “run of the mill”, but they do pack some punch and are far superior to high-pitched screams heard on their EP Apollo.
However as soon as you give their latest effort “The devil In Me” a spin, from the very first second even, the good news ends. Not only did their vocalist change but with him their entire musical direction and it didn’t change in a good way. Gone is the catchy post-hardcore sound that was done right, gone are the dual guitars and inspirational well-written lyrics. Instead of that we got another generic metalcore band that overuses electronica and thinks breakdowns is all that is needed to write a good song.
As soon as the first song called “The sixth seal” kicks in we are greeted by an uninspired breakdown and sadly it doesn’t stay with only this one. Every song on The Devil In Me has more breakdown on it then Apollo had as a whole. To make matters even worse, none of them are properly executed or add something to the music. And on top of all that, the creative songwriting, inspirational lyrics and great musicianship they showed on Apollo is totally gone and not even a glimpse of that is to be found here. It’s like every member in the band tried their best to come over as talentless as possible.
The Paramedic has the potential of writing great material, they already proved this with Apollo. Sadly, they show nothing of it on this record, I hope they realize this and go back to their earlier sound to further develop that. Their old sound combined with their new vocalist could lead to a very, very solid post-hardcore record in the liked of
Lower Definition, one that will be spoken of highly. Unlike this album, which will be remembered as “just another synthcore album” that no one actually cares about.
All in all, this is still a better release then offered by most of its peers like
Attack Attack! or
Woe, Is Me, not that means much though. They did good putting this EP up for free, as I have a hard time imagining anyone paying for this.
2/5
The Good:- Incredible clean vocals produced by the vocalist;
- More experimental than their peers (ex: use of a harp).
The Bad:- Uninspired, bland and above all boring instrumentation;
- Overuse of breakdowns and electronica;
- Everything on this album is incredibly mediocre, while they are capable of so much more.
