Review Summary: Nothing short of a masterpiece.
There's no doubt in my mind that "The Satellite Years" is the best melodic hardcore album of the previous decade. Of course this is my opinion, and you may agree or disagree as you wish.
The album opens with instrumental track 'Andromeda' which immediately draws you into the spacey themes found throughout the album. It is a catchy song that brings us into the first defining song on the record, 'Waitress'. Now 'Waitress' was a song that immediately floored me; with it's free spirited drums and crunchy guitar riffs followed by tense and wonderful screaming by the (then) new singer of the band, Jay Forrest. It is a simply wonderful song that is followed by 'Dead In Magazines', showcasing more delicate riffs mixed with the tense screams. A great outro featuring acoustic guitars is present here, with a relaxing mood as it's guest.
This is then followed by the bar-raising 'Dana Walker'; with it's absolutely incredible sense of direction and cohesiveness, the incredibly mellow 'Decoys Like Curves' featuring a majority of singing rather than screaming, the atonal and dissonant 'A Man Exit' (which features the best intro to a song that I've heard in a long time), the short and sweet instrumental 'Redshift', and the showstopping 'Only The Clouds', which has to be my favorite track on the album because of how hard it hits with such beautiful chords and passion from every musician in the band as they give it their all to make the later half of the album as fantastic as they can.
Those tracks comprise the bulk of the album, but two tracks remain, and I personally prefer to review them separately because they really are something else. 'Escape Pod For Intangibles' is a track governed by repetition of a single phrase, "I left the horizon curled up and frozen still; the tilting of the hourglass, with all this time to kill." As the guitars create a soothing atmosphere before the drums kick in and a sense of aggression and isolation take full grip of the song. After a few minutes, the song gently fades out as we get thrust into the last song of the album, 'The Bending'.
'The Bending' is nothing short of a masterpiece epic, clocking in at around 6:40 and featuring numerous changes in meter with melodic tones dripping from it's mouth and a grand sense of hardcore passion. You are spared no time to breath from the beginning until the very end where Adam Morgan's drum beat is further coerced into a distorted fury of feedback and 'satellite' noise until the fade out ends the album.
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I must say that I am an incredibly big .hopesfall. fan, and I own all their records and have them on a continuous(obnoxious) rotation, but I did not discover the band until two years after they had broken up, and I believe it to be one of the biggest disappointments that I had not known of them sooner. They were truly a band that captured the essence of melodic hardcore until the end (and yes, "A-Types" and "Magnetic North" were both fantastic albums as well even though they lacked the ferocity of the earlier releases). So if you do not know of hopesfall, please do give them a try, because if you dig them, you will find an absolute gem of a band.
Of special note is the absolutely fantastic guitar work that "The Satellite Years" features on it. Josh Brigham and Ryan Parrish sure knew what they were doing and each riff has it's own balance and connectivity to it, and they are very easy to resonate with. There's a fair bit of "chug-chug-chug" on this record, but one must remember it was released during a time where "chug-chug-chug" wasn't industry standard for hardcore bands.
I digress, "The Satellite Years" is a phenomenal album and I can go on for ages speaking praise about it, but really, do give it a listen.
