Josiah
Verona (2004)
Brian Shultz
"On the first day, God created Man.
On the second day, He created lame metalcore."
Repetitive and bland, mosh-ready riffs with dissonant growled yells are the formula for every one of these entirely-too-long songs on Josiah's debut full-length, Verona. The band is indeed Christian-founded, but you couldn't tell without a packet of liner notes (or a subtle press release); every word vocalist Joshua Lee screams is completely indecipherable, which actually wouldn't be such a bad thing if he didn't do it for the good part of forty-eight fucking minutes. There's very occasional use of spoken word vocals that sound trite as hell and an instance of more melodic singing that's nicely used in "This is the New War" and finally answers my own prayer for mixing it up at least a small bit.
There's no need to ever bag on a band for taking such a profound interest in religion and using it as a strong base for their songwriting, but when it's fronting these type of blah-worthy antics without any decent sense of musicianship or creativity, the package deal is something left to be desired.
MP3s
STREAM
Todd P. Hepler
This is the New War