Nights Like These - Sunlight at Secondhand Review
by Dan Upton
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My main thought about this CD: It's sad to see a band with a little bit of talent or ability in a particular style of music insist on doing a second-rate imitation of something else. Harsh words, perhaps, but I'd say it's true. What genre to try to stuff them in depends on who you ask: Wiki says metalcore, deathcore, and sludge metal; the band's MySpace page claims "Metal/Down-tempo/Psychedelic" while the PR blurb insists they're too melodic for death metal and too brutal for metalcore. Calling them death metal would be questionable at best, but I'm going to be a little lazier and lump them into post-hardcore.Yes, that's right, I'm going to put them in everybody's favorite amorphous blob of a genre. Sure, it's easy to hear the sludge metal, listening to the slower grinding phrases on songs like "Black the Sun" or "Bay of Pigs." And the metalcore is there too, and is in fact what you really hear first as the intro track "Heart of the Wound" comes pounding out of the gates. But it's really the sorts of things you might attribute to post-hardcore, the off-beat dissonant breakdowns or long noodly passages like "Collective Unconscious" where the band actually shines and offers up something interesting to listen to. Unfortunately, the CD is heavily weighted toward alternating sludgy and recycled hardcore/metalcore riffs and incoherent yelling. I guess two CDs and a few years into the career might be a bad time to expect a Victory Records band to change things up, so I guess there's little hope of Nights Like These focusing on their strengths and morphing into something a little more interesting and palatable. I'm sure there are lots of people who dig this as a heavier or rawer hybrid form of metalcore, but I'm not among them.
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Nights Like These - Sunlight at Secondhand
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