Band:	When All Light Dies
Album:	Transitions
Style:	Melodic metalcore
Release date:	October 2011

01. Through The Eyes Of The Observer
02. Shifting Gears
03. Guide You Down
04. In Ruins
05. Anything But Perceptive
06. Resignation
07. Caged By Time
08. Lost In Between
09. Under The Veil

When you're about to listen to the debut of a band which describes themselves as a "progressive metalband" who has shared the stage with the likes of Textures and TesseracT, you can safely assume it shall be filled with proudly pretentious, unadulterated fun in 7/4 timing; and if you didn't read the artist's bio, the color scheme on the cover and the song titles would have been a dead giveaway anyway. But one can always be mistaken.

When All Light Dies are actually a metalcore-tinged, modern melodic death metal band. Basically, cross the more mainstream aspects of James LaBrie's latest with some MyGrain, throw a few more simple and upbeat riff fragments with Noumena-guitar tones and mash it with a few shy cameos of metalcore, including breakdowns and clean vocals that totally don't sound like all the other clean vocals I've heard in this type of metal. Since I'm far from being the expert in the field, I couldn't have given you more prominent names in the genre to compare this to, just the releases I've heard which happen to contain some of the elements described here.

You see, I never spent more than 15 consecutive minutes listening to metalcore, or, for that matter, any melodeath that claims to be "modern" but leaves powerful melodies out of the equation. Not that I never tried - there's something in the very premise of the music that doesn't strike a chord with me. And I'm usually not the type to bash bands that are derivative, admitting to like some of the bands that refine and exploit the style better than the pioneers (I could take Lost Horizon and Teräsbetoni over Manowar any day). But this release has somehow achieved the impossible - it managed to sound exactly like ALL the scattered bits of music of this type I've ever heard of, and managed to not invoke interest in me despite the nice performance.

I'll leave this one without a rating, since I haven't heard enough albums of metal-whatever-core to see how it rates among its peers. If you're an extreme fan of the genre and you have absolutely nothing else to do, give them a listen, the performance and the production aren't shaggy at all, and it doesn't sound faulted or ill-composed... it just sounds terribly derivative in my ears. And since I've expected prog and got a not-quite-melodeath experience, I think I'll stick to James LaBrie's Static Impulse for the rest of the evening, which achieved a similar effect but left me with a far better aftertaste.