Tuesday, February 22, 2011

The Word Alive - Demo (2008)



To Prove the Point I'm Going To Make In My Review, here is "Can't Let Up" off of "The Word Alive EP"


Now Here is it redone on "Empire EP" now called "Inviting Eyes"
There's a difference between BETTER Producing and OVER Producing -_-

Two years ago something suddenly dawned on me. "I haven't been to a show in forever" I thought to myself, and suddenly I was itching to go see live music. I started to look for upcoming shows and I wasn't being picky, as long as I knew the band I was going to see them. I noticed skyeatsairplane was playing a show soon, so I bought my tickets and checked to see who was opening: In fear and Faith, Eyes Set to Kill, and The Word Alive. I had no idea who any of them were, so I started looking for albums to download to check them out, In fear and faith and Eyes Set to Kill were simple searches, but I could not find shit on The Word Alive. So I researched it a little bit and found out that they had yet to officially release anything yet. At that time I did a lot of my listening either while driving or on break at my job, so I needed something downloadable to get familiar with these guys. I ended up finding a zip file on mediafire labeled "The Word Alive Myspace", and it had the five songs from the bands page. That 'demo' quickly became one of my favorite CDs, it was a refreshing take on the metalcore genre. These songs had a good flow, they were up tempo and intense and flowed in and out of breakdowns seemlessly, whereas with the other bands they felt forced. In short they were just well written songs played with a lot of energy and intensity.

Compared to this, Empire EP was a huge, HUGE, disapointment. It was overproduced as balls, they sucked the life out of the songs. Inviting Eyes was called Can't Let Up on the original demo, they lowered the bass, increased the keyboards presence, cleaned the guitar and cleaned the screams up, they took away all the things that made The Word Alive unique. The Empire EP was just a release from another cookie cutter Emo/metalcore band. Deceiver was better, but still overproduced as balls. I'm glad I got to see them when I did and that I was able to find this demo so I can show yall how good these guys were before they let the scene producers change them into more of the same.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just so you know, Inviting eyes was called "Can't Let Up" on the demo. "Casanova Rodeo" is the same on their EP and LP except for the way the lyrics are sung.
As for the over-production, I slightly agree. Their ep is for sure over produced, but the LP is well done. The majority of the album is a refreshing take on metalcore.
Also The Word Alive is one of the best bands I have seen live. The shows are as good as the cd if not better.

heywhatsthatnoise??? said...

Ha! Thanks for pointing that out, at least I got it right at the top of the post, 50% aint bad :p

I enjoyed Deceiver when it first came out, haha I actually reviewed it on here and had nothing but good things to say about it, and I think the songs themselves are all great, it just sounds like something that was made using protools, not actual instruments...I agree about the shows totally, when I saw them they completely stole the show with a 4 song set.

heywhatsthatnoise??? said...

And thanks for the comment by the way! I get one o' those once in a blue moon, at best...

Anonymous said...

Thanks bro! Today this demo is hard to get!