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Break the
Silence: Near Life Experience
You can chalk up a victory on the board for Break the Silence's debut Near Life Experience, as these Chicago hardcore vets have come into their own with this impressive release on Hopeless Records. The opening track, "At War With Instinct" has a misleading introduction, featuring vocals that are reminiscent of Bad Religion's Greg Graffin. But lead vocalist Dan Wintercorn's brutal vocals incinerate your ears seconds into the song until the melodic pop-punk backing vocals kick in again. This sets the tone for the majority of the songs on the album, but the best tracks are the ones that feature the bare minimum of that Orange County-esque harmonizing on the microphones. One track that sticks to that pattern is "Iris," a tortured ode to the ones that just never got the point of friendship and trust. Themes like betrayal and abandonment, along with the introspection needed to cry out the injustice of it all, are central to the "screamo" ethos, and Break the Silence stays close to that formula for most part even though the "screamo" tag is only meant in general terms and not as a pigeonholing tactic. Nevertheless, it's an amazing accomplishment that this band has come from different bands of the "hard-edge" spectrum of music to coalesce for this synthesis of hardcore and pop-punk, but refuses to linger in any one particular style for too long. Along with Wintercorn, guitarist Dan Precision (a.k.a. Dan Wleklinski) sets the album ablaze with his fierce hands, especially on "Slaughter of the Soul," a cover of the classic song from Nord-Core legends At The Gates. Even though his name sounds more Polish than Swedish, you wouldn't be able to tell that just by hearing the song alone, and you would think he was from Gothenburg just by looking at the pictures of him in the liner notes. While he was a member of 88 Fingers Louie, he never achieved the potential that he is only now beginning to tap into with Break the Silence. While this album has moments that resemble other Chicago hardcore notables Rise Against and Most Precious Blood, "Near Life Experience" has an original sound that is too hard to question, even by the harshest of critics.
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