Just Another Hardcore Band
After reading a little about Time In Malta and discovering the word ‘hardcore’ everywhere I look, I feel that at least I am prepared for whatever is coming. I turn up the volume and begin at, well, the beginning (it seemed appropriate). My first thought is that I have the wrong CD. What I am greeted by is not hardcore; it isn’t even punk-esque. ‘Forty Seven’ is a beautiful mass of sound with a jangling acoustic guitar amid unidentifiable noises, which, despite the band’s best efforts, lasts forty-eight seconds. At around forty seconds, my fear has been suitably numbed by the acoustic guitar, so when the tightly distorted axe-work and thumping drums of ‘Bare Witness’ arrive, I am taken by surprise, to say the least. Ah, so this is where they are hiding the hardcore. Throughout the album, the quality of the guitar work is evident, often, as can be heard here and later in the intro of ‘Event Horizon’, a higher-pitched part rides on top of the choppy chord pattern. The whole effect manages to switch between metal and punk, depending on how the drummer is feeling. Todd Guillon’s shouted vocals burst into the song and remain pretty constant throughout. Now, personally, I have an aversion to shouted vocals as a constant feature, it seems so unnecessary to me. A couple of neatly placed shouts at the climax of a song can sound great, but I don’t stick with shouted vocals throughout. This, of course, is only my opinion, so now that I have made my views clear, I will try and continue this review objectively.
I look at my CD player and notice that sometime in the last few minutes, ‘Bare Witness’ became ‘Tightrope’. Perhaps it is the similarity of sounds used, I don’t know. The songs don’t sound the same, and there is a clearly discernable pause between the songs, perhaps I accidentally set my ears to ‘cruise’..? ‘Tightrope’ combines the shouting with a singing voice, albeit a very punk singing voice. I am a little confused by the middle section, sounding as it does, more at home in the middle of a Sum 41 song. It breaks up the song, and is refreshingly different from the rest. The song comes to a climax in an intense moment of driving percussion and the shoutiest of shouting, before an abrupt ending. Track three, ‘Louder Than Bombs’ exhibits Guillon’s melodic capabilities in all their dusky glory. Like ‘Tightrope’ before it, ‘Louder Than Bombs’ is less choppy and more angsty, with whole bars on once chord, rather than a high speed chordal riff.
I have to say, that in my opinion, this album gets progressively better with each successive track. This is up to track 5, ‘Ghosts’, at least. A clean guitar that has proven so elusive since the first track begins, accompanied by Adam Goldstein and his hi-hats. This is soon enveloped by a similar pattern covered with distortion and palm-mutes. Guillon tackles this song almost entirely without shouting, and, despite the same tight and heavy guitar and drum work, this song communicates a sadness. A sadness as opposed to a hatred or anger. ‘What Are We Afraid Of?’ sees a return to the loud and abrasive mood of the first track. The sadness of ‘Ghosts’ has all but dissolved into anger and noise.
‘Fused As One’ begins quietly, creating a sandwich on ‘What Are We Afraid Of?’ between two smoother, sadder and less shouted tracks. The angst guitar is turned on here, but quickly replaced with a palm mute instead. After the initial control, ‘Fused As One’ lets lose with as heavy a section as will be found anywhere on this CD. The middle and end of this track are possibly the best moments on the CD.
‘Perform The Surgery’, as well as having slightly eye-opening name, is another of the choppy guitar, fast drums and shouting tracks. Chris Lyon utilises his axe to its maximum potential to create the sparse middle section from the crunch of the beginning. Musically, this is probably my favourite song on the album. ‘Catalyst’ begins with a high pitched guitar riff rather than the standard growling chords. A rolling percussion is offered by Goldstein. This is just your standard hardcore track. Todd Guillon’s vocals are beginning to sound like Generic Punk Vocalist, perhaps the whole growling, crunching and shouting sound, juxtaposed with the softer, sung sound has been done once too often, not just on this CD, but within this genre as a whole.
After a while, it can be heard that there are two types of song on this album; the shouted and the sung. ‘Event Horizon’ is one of the sung, and, quite frankly doesn’t distinguish itself as anything different from any of the previous sung songs. ‘Start With Me’, however, begins in such a way that it could develop into either a shouted or a sung. As it happens, this is more of a hybrid, tending towards the shouted. By this time, I have heard more of Time In Malta than I ever could take ordinarily, and differences between songs are becoming more and more difficult to discern. The album ends with ‘The Wayfarer’, a six minute journey into the previous eleven songs. There are elements of everything that makes the Time In Malta sound evident here; the singing, the shouting, the high-pitched guitaring, the powerful chords, the palm-muting. It’s all explored here. An epic instrumental sits in the middle of this song, slowly winding down to the acoustic sounds experienced so long ago in ‘Forty Seven’ and simply vanishing.