Review Summary: Intense metalcore ruined by terrible clean vocals
For The Fallen Dreams are a metalcore band from Michigan. Their last album "Relentless" was a very well done metalcore album with heavy breakdowns and very few clean vocals. "Back Burner" is anything but a very well done metalcore album. The heavy breakdowns are still there and very good, however, the very few clean vocals have turned into what the **** are all these cleans doing here.
Dylan Ritcher is the vocalist for the band and he has very good gutterals. They get old rather quickly, however, and that also takes away from the album a little. On "Relentless", Ritcher incorporates some high screams, but they are very limited on Back Burner. His cleans as I mentioned before are terrible and take a lot away from the album. The song "Bottom Feeders" is completely clean vocals and might be the worst song that I have ever heard. Another thing Ritcher does that annoys me is how he runs his vocals together. "The Big Empty" is the best example of that. It gets very annoying very quickly. I thought that they should have had a guest vocalist on the album like Jeremy McKinnon on "Relentless".
The actual band is good, but the song writting by former drummer Andrew Tkaczyk is not there, and it shows big time. The breakdowns are no longer put in the right place and there is way to many in "Back Burner". The bass is inaudible as usual, so there is not much to say about that. The drumming, which was above average with Tkaczyk in the band, is lackluster at best. The talent is there, but there is a lot of room for improvement in the song writting.
For The Fallen Dreams put out two very impressive albums before "Back Burner", which is anything but impressive. It is unfortunate that their primary song writter is gone, but For The Fallen Dreams needs to suck it up and deal with it.
