Band:	City Of Caterpillar
Album:	Mystic Sisters
Style:	Screamo, Post hardcore, Post rock
Release date:	September 2022

01. Thought Drunk
02. Paranormaladies
03. Decider
04. Mystic Sisters
05. Manchester
06. Voiceless Prophets
07. In The Birth Of A Fawn
08. Ascension Theft… (Gnawing Of The Bottom-Feeders)

A screamo band returning after more than a decade and adapting their sound to something less intense?! Where have I heard that before?!

Screamo is the kind of genre that gets quite a bad rep because of how much people called everything with a note of harsh vocals "screamo" back when I first started getting into metal. Most of what they meant was some sort of melodic metalcore or whatever, and it had nothing to do with stuff like Orchid (USA-MA), Envy, Funeral Diner, Saetia, or Pageninetynine. You'll find the same issue with "post-hardcore", where people would refer to something like Asking Alexandria as such instead of bands like At The Drive-In or Unwound. Finding differences between different nuances of hardcore is not often very easy, so a lot of screamo is just a harsher version of post-rock, which is blended with either math rock or post-rock or emo, and things are very rarely just one subgenre.

While the rant part of this is over, what this also means is that it is pretty easy for a band like City Of Caterpillar, whose 2002 self-titled debut became a classic in the genre, and which already had the screamo joined by a lot of straight-forward post-hardcore and post-rock, to just focus on different parts of this hardcore-tinged soup. City Of Caterpillar in 2022 is no longer something I'd call a "screamo band" first and foremost, though they still have bits and pieces left, but because of how varied their sound already was and how it's hard to expect a band to have the exact same intense energy two decades later, shifting the sound does seem very organic. I mean, it's not like "post-hardcore" is mellow music, but the approach is now even more somber and atmospheric.

While I have a slight preference for Gospel's prog tinged approach, there's something fantastic about the sense of ebb and flow that City Of Caterpillar have, particularly in the slow build up of the title track, managing to find ways to apply post-rock like structures without delving into crescendocore. The more post-hardcore direction does give a lot more At The Drive-In and Fugazi vibes, which does make their sound a bit less unique than it was on their debut, but they mix things up by making things noise rock tinged at times, something that strangely also affects the position that the vocals have to enhance the atmospheric emphasis of the record. As much as the screamo aspect of the record has been toned down, the vocals still have a very impactful presence.

I understand how huge anticipation and expectations for this record were, which also did extend to how I felt pressure to give it justice with this review, but having seen plenty of lukewarm or disappointing reunions, just the thought that there's a new City Of Caterpillar album (and it doesn't suck) is enough to make me very happy. I don't want to say that Mystic Sisters sounds like City Of Caterpillar never broke up, but it does sound like a band that had plenty of time to evolve.