Review Summary: It's practically the same thing over and over again.
Sometimes very good bands go through musical rough patches. This is very evident right now for We Came As Romans with the recent release of their self-titled album. Usually able to produce a record that contains diverse tracks, We Came As Romans comes up short here.
When putting together an album, it should be expected that the majority of songs will not share too many similarities. In previous efforts, We Came As Romans has done a pretty damn good job at doing that, but they must have thrown that essential foundation out the window this time. Almost all of the songs on ‘We Came As Romans’ have the same song structure. For a band that has two vocalists, which opens up a lot of opportunities to create various song structures, this a step in the wrong direction. It is especially so since the song structure of choice is the very generic intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus structure.
Now this doesn’t completely ruin a record, as long as the artist is able to musically diversify each song instead of structurally. Well… WCAR doesn’t do this either. It honestly seems that like they used the same rhythm over and over again and they only changed the order of the notes ever so slightly. ‘We Came As Romans’ has a very monotone, drawn out tone throughout the album. Tracks 2, 3, and 4 sound like the exact same song. The musicianship is really lacking here.
Lyrically, the band touches on the same subjects it has before. They definitely don’t redeem the negative qualities of the album, but they don’t make it any worse (it’s really hard to at this point).
Now there are a couple of songs that are able to stand on their own. ‘Regenerate’ is probably the most respectable song on this record and ‘Blur’ is worth looking up and listening to, but that’s about it.
In all honestly, I don’t know what WCAR was trying to go for here on this album. My guess is that they were trying to see if they could make it as a post-hardcore band. I hope with this release, WCAR realizes what they’re doing wrong and go back to what they used to do: creating dynamic and forceful metalcore music.
