ATTN: Skylines.

You are not Every Time I Die.

Try as you might to be Every Time I Die, the most that people are going to see you as is "that band trying to rip off Every Time I Die." Kind of ironic that the album name is Identity, because this band couldn't be further from having one of their own.

If you were to take Hot Damn! and a touch of singing, and make the lyrics worse, the result would undoubtedly be this record. It's just lacking any sort of creative capacity. The riffs, while not inventive in the slightest, are hard-hitting and feature enough variation to not be annoyingly repetitive. They do use a lot of the same tones and stylistic elements that ETID made a trademark with, and it's especially noticeable in a track like "The Pugilist's Lament," a song that also borrows heavily from the lyrics of the aforementioned record.

The band's vocalist even sounds a ton like Keith Buckley, especially when spouting lines like "Ice cold killers, dressed to the nines in white tuxedos / Ready to sell…razor sharp lapels sever / The strings of forgiveness, and light the fires of hell." The song itself is rather uneventful, save for some random heavy riffs that inject some life into what's an otherwise boring track.

While the review does come off as being rather harsh, this really is not all that bad of a record. In fact, if ETID had never existed, I'd find myself enjoying this quite a bit. But why listen to a band that sounds like Every Time I Die, when you can just go listen to Every Time I Die?