Review Summary: we're walking home into thin air
Although likened to more mature, developed bands like Misery Signals, the Pennsylvania five piece have never impressed me with anything other than their 2009 foray into maturity, solid hooks and vicious, biting vocals that refrained from cheesiness (for the most part). That album, Constellations, was the first that showed me the band were capable of something other than generic, sloppy metalcore. In 2011, on their fourth album Leveler, a polished finish matched a band simplified in every aspect, attempting to distract from this fact by including awkward Spanish-inflected guitar interludes amongst other pieces of unfulfilled experimentation.
On Rescue and Restore, the band regain the emotional intensity they grasped on Constellations, but implement far too many poor ideas for this to be an important factor here. For all the impressive guitar work being thrown around, there’s just as much monotonous chug filling the gaps. The vocals aren’t much better, and though expanded slightly since Leveler they lack aggression and often sound more than a little forced. On top of this, the bass only makes rare appearances, sounding far too saturated when it does, and the drums are totally unimpressive, pretty much just playing along to whatever the guitarists decide to throw up during the duration of this increasingly tiresome, mixed bag of an album.
This is a heavier, more varied record than Leveler, but it lacks consistency. Dire lyrics, immensely boring and far too frequent breakdowns, and idiotic violin and spoken word sections ruin any of the mindless brutality Rescue and Restore could have potentially presented as an appealing factor. Dragging on far too long, throwing up eleven more of the most boring metalcore tracks of the year and generally just being really typical of an already deeply uninteresting genre, Rescue and Restore is the laziest, most poorly assembled album of August Burns Red’s career, and a total failure at evolving into the band they clearly want to be.
