Sinai Beach

When Breath Escapes [reissue] (2006)

Bryan

It's reissue season for Victory Records. January produced a reissue of the Autumn Offering's full-length debut; March a deluxe edition of Darkest Hour's So Sedated, So Secure; April, a reissue of Aiden's first full-length as well as the Sinai Beach album here in question; two collections of older material by Silverstein and the Junior Varsity are due out late Spring as well. This may be due to a lack of immediate releases from recent signings, or that besides releases from Atreyu and Dead to Fall, nothing comparatively major is out until at least late May. While the offering of releases may be a mixed bag, listeners should get a few solid albums out of it, including this one.

After listening to When Breath Escapes, it's no surprise that Sinai Beach were once signed to Facedown Records. Before their days of nü-metalcore with Danzig-esque vocals, Sinai Beach's roots were based much more in hardcore. While it was still mainly metalcore, the slight nü-metal sound hadn't developed, and the tracks were filled with some hardcore breakdowns and the like. Also, CJ's singing here is actually pretty memorable, and though it's slightly underused, fits in perfectly.

Tracks like "Candice" pretty much sum up Sinai Beach. While the metal/hardcore, shout/sing hyrbird is obviously oversaturated, thanks to the guitar work laid down and the above average vocals, Sinai Beach at least manage to stay above a majority of the bands playing this style of music. However, iIt doesn't help that the lack of originality hinders the high points, and a little bit of technicality would have been a nice touch, mainly because the overused breakdowns get old fast.

If someone were asking me about Sinai Beach, I'd tell them to check out When Breath Escapes before Immersed. Before Sinai Beach retrogressed to an even more stale-sounding band, they at least had short bursts of enjoyable metalcore that gave this release a solid fight to become something better than it really was.