Review Summary: An excellent effort which unites many new elements to All That Remains' music.
Eww, metalcore. That is what I would have said a few years back, when I first heard of All That Remains. I had listened to a song from This Darkened Heart, and I instantly hated it. To me, they seemed like an excuse for music, exactly what my early impression of metalcore was. It was due to the growing numbers of untalented metalcore artists who all had the same formula: loud growling and screaming, thrashing guitar, odd time signatures, and low quality production. Obviously, it was the type of music which feature brutality and heaviness over melody and technicality.
However, over the years, I started reviving my interest in metal bands, mostly focusing on alternative metal. However, upon listening to Bullet For My Valentine, I was blown away by their music, how it balanced melody and technicality, singing and screaming. Later, I noticed that people who bought The Poison also bought The Fall Of Ideals by who else, but All That Remains.
The Fall Of Ideals is by far one of my heaviest albums, and one of my very favorite. What at first impressed me was Phil's voice. Melissa Cross did a good job in teaching him, as he has showed a large improvement vocally. His singing voice is clean and melodic, and his growls are better than ever, and show more diversity. When I first heard the Weak Willed, man, what a blast it was. Suddenly hearing him do the death metal growl was a shock to me, I was amazed at how low his voice got. It was lower than most death metal growls I had heard anyway.
The percussions are also excellent. The drummer is very talented, and very fast. Not so fast that the drums become incredibly repetitive as seen in bands such as Dragonforce, but fast enough to give the song more power than ever. The guitar's also welldone in this album. The dual guitar's provide some nice melody to cover in during Phil's growling, and some of the riffs are the catchiest that I've ever heard (as seen in the beginning of Empty Inside).
To wrap it up, this is album that features many styles of metal. Not Alone's guitar is heavily influenced by bands such as Iron Maiden. Phil's voice can vary from standard metalcore growling, death metal growls, and hardcore yells. The guitar is melodic, and technical, and the solos are among the best that I've heard, catchy and original. This is an album that will be appreciated by most of the metal community.
