| 4.5 superb |
| 1000 Travels of Jawaharlal Owari Wa Konai |
| A Wilhelm Scream Ruiner |
| 14 tracks filled with crazy guitars, technical base, and raw unadulterated emotion. A Wilhelm Scream takes us back to a time when punk was simple and honest. |
| Against Me! Reinventing Axl Rose |
| Against Me! As the Eternal Cowboy |
| An Embrace of Angels 'Ere January Be Unwintered |
| August Burns Red Messengers |
| Blacklisted Heavier Than Heaven, Lonelier Than God |
| Botch We Are the Romans |
| Ceremony (USA-CA) Still Nothing Moves You |
| Champion Promises Kept |
| Circle Takes the Square As the Roots Undo |
| Converge No Heroes |
| Crime In Stereo Crime In Stereo Is Dead |
| Crime In Stereo I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone |
| Dance Gavin Dance Downtown Battle Mountain |
| Discordance Axis The Inalienable Dreamless |
| DJ Shadow Endtroducing..... |
| Envy Insomniac Doze |
| Envy Abyssal |
| Explosions in the Sky The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place |
| Fear Before Fear Before |
| Have Heart Songs To Scream At The Sun |
| Intronaut Prehistoricisms |
| Iron Maiden Piece Of Mind |
| Iron Maiden A Matter Of Life And Death |
| Up the mother****ing irons, bitches. Iron Maiden is back, and just as good, if not better, than ever. |
| ISIS Panopticon |
| Panopticon might just be one of the greatest albums made in the last 20 years. It combines disarmingly beautiful atmospherics with some of the most flat-out brutal moments in music. God bless Aaron Turner. |
| ISIS In the Absence of Truth |
| ISIS Wavering Radiant |
| Kid Dynamite Shorter, Faster, Louder |
| This album is truly hardcore's mission statement; 18 songs with nothing but pure passion, emotion and energy. God bless Dan Yemin. |
| La Dispute Somewhere at the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair |
| Lifetime Jersey's Best Dancers |
| Loma Prieta Last City |
| mewithoutYou Catch For Us the Foxes |
| Modern Life Is War Midnight in America |
| Mono Hymn to the Immortal Wind |
| Mouth Of The Architect Quietly |
| Norma Jean The Anti Mother |
| P.O.S Never Better |
| Paint It Black New Lexicon |
| Polar Bear Club The Redder, The Better |
| Polar Bear Club Sometimes Things Just Disappear |
| Polar Bear Club Chasing Hamburg |
| Red Sparowes Every Red Heart Shines Toward The Red... |
| With a sinewy, graceful, yet heavy attack, the Red Sparowes capture post-rock at it's best. |
| Rosetta Wake/Lift |
| On the cover of this album, there appears to be a mass of cranes, scaffolding, and other metal apparatuses. Now imagine all of that piled on top of you, slowly, but surely crushing you. That's essentialy what listening to Wake/Lift feels like. |
| Russian Circles Station |
| The Dillinger Escape Plan Calculating Infinity |
| The Fall of Troy Manipulator |
| A bit disappointing compared to Doppelganger, but Manipulator is a fine album nonetheless. |
| The Fall of Troy Phantom on the Horizon |
| The Gaslight Anthem Sink or Swim |
| The Gaslight Anthem Señor and the Queen |
| The Gaslight Anthem The '59 Sound |
| The Ocean Precambrian |
| Ever wanted to know what it would feel like to have bricks slowly, but surely placed on top of you, until you were crushed? Then listen to this album. |
| Verse Aggression |
| 4.0 excellent |
| Achilles (USA-NY) Hospice |
| This album will blow your mind. Rory VanGrol's screams are ridiculously intense, as if he's trying to simultaneously destroy his throat and your ears at the same time. The riffing is spectacular, and the drumming keeps the rythym just fine. A stellar effor overall. |
| Against Me! New Wave |
| Agraceful The Great I Am |
| If you loved Emarosa's debut EP, This Is Your Way Out, and miss Chris Roetter's vocals, then pick up thisa album ASAP. |
| Alkaline Trio Goddamnit |
| All Time Low So Wrong, It's Right |
| One of the best pop-punk albums in recent memory. No pretense, no throwaway songs. Just solid, honest, and often beautifully well-written songs. It's good to be young. |
| Architects Hollow Crown |
| At the Drive-In Relationship of Command |
| Atmosphere When Life Gives You Lemons... |
| Baroness Red Album |
| Brand New Deja Entendu |
| Cadence Weapon Breaking Kayfabe |
| Comeback Kid Wake the Dead |
| Crime In Stereo The Troubled Stateside |
| Dance Gavin Dance Dance Gavin Dance |
| Emarosa This Is Your Way Out |
While reading the May 2007 issue of Alternative Press magazine, I came upon a page advertising several Rise Records artists. Wedged into the middle of the page was a tiny advertisment for Emarosa's This is Your Way Out EP. Thank God I caught that tiny section, or I wouldn't have discovered them while original singer Chris was still in the band.
While most modern post-hardcore bands are content to stay to a formulaic From First to Last-like style, Emarosa strays from the path a bit by virtue of having some really really deep throated roars. While there is alot of screaming on this EP, there is also alot of deep throat roats coming from Chris' mouth. They also manage to couple this with some amazingly beautiful melodic singing. This alternating sing/scream/roar creates some simultaneously beautiful and chaotic moments.
But the thing I like most about this album is how open Emarosa is about their Christian faith. If you listen/read the lyrics carefully, you'll see that this is actually a concept EP, telling the story of the Book of Revelations, or for those of you who didn't brush up on your Bibile trivia, the end of the world. In most of the songs, particularily Casablanca and Epoch Coda, they convey their faith in God, even as the world around them is coming to and end. Kudos to you Emarosa, for an EP well made. |
| Every Time I Die The Big Dirty |
| Fight Amp Hungry For Nothing |
| In a industry filled with studio magic and uber-producers, it's nice to see a band like Fight Amp. Their gritty and purposely underproduced brand of sludgy metalcore is a refreshing listen. |
| Gojira From Mars to Sirius |
| Gojira The Way of All Flesh |
| Have Heart The Things We Carry |
| Heaven In Her Arms Erosion of the Black Speckle |
| Heaven Shall Burn Iconoclast (Part 1: The Final Resistance) |
| I Would Set Myself On Fire For You Believes In Patterns |
| Kid Dynamite Kid Dynamite |
| M83 Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts |
| M83 Saturdays=Youth |
| Ocean Pantheon of the Lesser |
| Oh, Sleeper When I Am God |
| If Norma Jean and post-Dallas Taylor Underoath had a love child, Oh Sleeper would sound a like that. Just much better. |
| Olivia the Band Olivia the Band |
| P.O.S Audition |
| Paint It Black Paradise |
| Pelican Australasia |
| Pelican City of Echoes |
| Planes Mistaken for Stars Up In Them Guts |
| Russian Circles Enter |
| Set Your Goals Mutiny! |
| Shai Hulud Misanthropy Pure |
| Shook Ones Sixteen |
| Shook Ones Facetious Folly Feat |
| Small Brown Bike The River Bed |
| A great album from a band that broke up way before their time. Small Brown Bike has more emotion than every single MTV "punk" band put together. |
| Stick to Your Guns Comes From the Heart |
| Streetlight Manifesto Somewhere in the Between |
| Strike Anywhere Dead FM |
| Take It Back! Can't Fight Robots |
| A great combination of traditional melodic hardcore with some Set Your Goals-like poppier-but-still-hardcore moments. This, balanced with their strong Christian values results in a great debut album. The only thing I find a little dissapointing about this album is its strong resemblance to Comeback Kid. Other than that, it's a fine piece of work. |
| The Blood Brothers ...Burn, Piano Island, Burn |
