2 out of 5

Label: Victory

Producer: Brian McTernan

2 stars isn’t really fair.  It’s not that Snapcase “sold out” with this album – they’d always been standouts in the Victory roster pre the teen hardcore explosion of the 2000s – so cool hardcore kids generally shook their heads in dismay when you said you like Snappy.  It’s not even that the songs are bad.  The album kicks off with a total rocker with ‘Coagulate,’ and though even here the band shows the shift toward the more melodic Thursday stuff, it’s blended with their pulsing thud and yells to the extent that it’s still the band’s own sound.  This opener is a highlight, but the first half of the album manages to rock mostly as well.  It’s 2 stars because it’s disappointing.  Nothing really gets me amped up on here like the Snapcase of old, and I have to wonder if I’d even be listening to it if not for their previous albums – if someone said this new band just landed and heeeere’s their first album ‘End Transmission,’ I’d say it’s not bad, the lyrics are pretty normal trite Victory revolution stuff, and it sounds like just another melodic hardcore band, produced by that guy that happened to be producing a lot of the melodic hardcore at the time, Brian McTernan, so all ears tuned toward radio play.

When Cave In went to RCA, it was selling out, but I still listen to that album.  Cave In was never the grandmaster of any particular corner of hardcore to me, always a slightly sloppy, yearning-for-their-own-sound blend of Converge and Botchy guitar works.  Jupiter might’ve been “revolutionary” for a throaty yelly band, but it was a pretty typical album.  And you can trace Heart Stops Cave In to Jupiter pretty easily, and you can trace Jupiter to their major label release pretty easily.  And though there might be some initial shock of hearing their big ol’ radio single and then going to listen to their early Hydra Head stuff, if you read the lyrics and pay attention to the song structure, you can even hear how those glimpses of the band tie together.  I listen to all of those albums, I have tracks I like on all of them, and tracks I think are just okay.  My point being that Cave In has always been Cave In.  Whereas End Transmission does not sound like Snapcase to me, except that you can recognize Taberski’s vocals.

I drop something about the “first half” of the album.  There’s a definite shift from somewhat interesting mixtures of Snapcase aggression plus patience with song construction (something that admittedly peeked through on the previous album, but was nursed to fruition here) to more slow, emotional rockers, see-sawing around track “New Kata.”  Supposedly this is a “concept” album, which also grates a bit, as Taberski’s lyrics have always edged on silly, but at least he shouted them hard and fast enough that I mostly didn’t care.  Now I can sort of understand him, and the maybe post-apocalyptic whatever vision that’s being spun here seems, y’know, more silly because of that.

Anyhow.  It doesn’t feel like the band purposefully jumped in to the then new “Victory Records” sound, more that they were looking for a new direction, and pitched their tent yeabouts.  They constructed it by design – it’s solid, a good location – but lo, there were already tents there.  Average album when looked at by itself – not defined enough to make an impact, but polished and rockin’ in parts –  but End Transmission is disappointing when compared to the band’s pants-poopin’ crotch-kickin’ previous albums.

UPDATE – September, 2013: -Sigh- this is now the Snapcase disc I listen to the most.  I still think everything I said up there is valid… except that when you do isolate the disc from the group’s discography, it becomes better and better on repeated listens.  There’s a certain confidence to it that comes from, I’d suspect, the group’s history, that makes it stand apart a bit from the at-the-time soundalikes.  And because it’s easier on the ears, you can put this on repeat, vs. early Snapcase which requires a breather after a listen.  So it’s still either one or the other – I think it’s hard to hold the two styles of the band side-by-side, but I’d re-underline that that by no means makes this a bad album.  (Bastards)