All Shall Perish-This Is Where It Ends

It’s July 23^rd and I come home to see that my pre-order of This Is Where It Ends by All Shall Perish has arrived at my doorstep three days before its release. It feels like Christmas day since I’m a huge All Shall Perish fan and I also got the limited red vinyl edition with a shirt and an autographed poster. And yes, I do listen to vinyl LPs and I own my own turntable. This isn’t my first purchase of a Nuclear Blast LP; I bought Entity by Origin on vinyl. I’ve been following these guys ever since I heard about the release of Awaken the Dreamers. I also ended up seeing them on the 2010 Summer Slaughter Tour, and I think that they did the best performance of the event besides Decrepit Birth. So after putting it through my dad’s record cleaner to get off the crap from the factory, I place the bright red disc on my turntable.

Like most of the albums I end up loving, the first song on the album usually has a longish intro that builds up and then explodes into the song. But instead of an intro, all of the instruments instantly leaped out of the speakers at full speed like all mayhem had broke loose. The distortion of the guitars is very similar to Awaken the Dreamers. But the whole instrumentation is tighter than ever, this is especially expressed in the breakdowns. This is one of the most technical and best albums I have ever heard. This album has the classic All Shall Perish sound. Half of the time it’s pure technicality and volume, and half the time the sound of the music is very ambient and atmospheric. The atmospheric parts on this album kind of remind me of the title song off of Depths by Oceano. One point that I noticed that I would like to add is that Eddie has stopped using pig squeals and inhaled growls. Another thing that I notice is that Adam Pierce gets better and better with each album; I can’t see how he could possibly get any better than this. And that’s the same with all of the musicians in this astonishing quintet.

All Shall Perish is another one of the metal bands out there that have politically themed/anti-government lyrics. Some other bands that have those lyrics are Dying Fetus, Dope, Despised Icon, The Red Chord, Havok, and Testament. You can see on the album cover that the guy in the center that’s all tied up and bloody has his eyes covered with a bandana with the American flag, and that there is a catholic priest pointing at him, possibly accusing him for something.

Like I said before, the music instantly leaps out of the speakers with full power on Divine Illusion. This is definitely where all of the members are tighter than ever. The drumming is astonishingly fast and technical as are the guitars. The bass has an interesting part in this song, rather than following along pretty closely to the guitars, the bass part is actually not that fast, but it is very technical and complex. My favorite song on this album so far (I’ve only played the record twice so far) is There Is Nothing Left. The first six chords that the guitarists play sound pretty ambient, but then it instantly drops down to a lower, darker key, but then goes back to being all ambient, and that pattern repeats all throughout the song. One thing that I’m noticing about deathcore bands is that the difference in tempo speed in the main part of the song and the breakdowns is not as extreme as it used to be. I’m not saying this is bad at all, but I don’t LOVE it. It does sound cooler that the bands are making the changes in speed more smoothly, but I do like to have an epic tempo drop (an example of my opinion of a perfect breakdown would be in Stabbing to Purge Dissimulation from Awaken the Dreamers). Otherwise, I can’t really find any faults at all in this album! This gets a perfect score for being one of the best albums of 2011.