Beyond the Embrace - Insect Song (2004)

The debut of Beyond the Embrace amounted to little more than sodden In Flames worship which tried to distance itself with a mix of bland Hetfield vocals and one more guitarist. You could take even the most rueful, underwhelming effort from the Swedish band and have your ears profit ten-fold to what the Massachusetts youngsters were birthing. We all make mistakes, though, and perhaps once the band shook free of the cabbage patch of wannabe mediocrity, they would truly carve out a niche for themselves. Two years later, a sophomore album manifested by the name of Insect Song, and the band took another shot at reaching the spotlight that many of their peers were now suckling upon like a great rock star teat.

You'll immediately notice that the production of Insect Song is thicker and superior to its predecessor, creating a lot more impact when the rhythm guitars chug along. The first track on the album, "Fleshengine" is an attempt to break from the baleful comparisons of the debut. Sure, they still sound derivative, with more of a fueled 90s Metallica or Testament thrusting thrash rhythm, and the vocals to match, though they're a little more sad and 'rock and roll'. This is a fairly bad tune, but at least I wasn't scratching out my taste buds. The melodic death does arrive in the bridge, but it's competently executed and the heavier emphasis on the rhythm leads to a semi satisfying crunch. "Plague", however, is a complete reversion to the In Flames dominated drive of Against the Elements, only with the added burden of a terrible breakdown at about 1:45 which sounds like any garden variety, shitty New England metalcore band who wants to prove just how angry and emotional they are. This foul taste only crosses the tongue for a second before the band heads off into lead territory, but its enough to ask the waiter for the bill and leave the restaurant.

After hearing such tripe, one could only ascertain a dire prediction for the remainder of the CD, and "My Fall" seems to enforce this, a bouncy middle paced melodic death tune which fuses in some big rock chords to try and befriend you, like a Massachusetts alternative to Sentenced. We're back to copying In Flames with "...of Every Strain" and "Redeemer", though the latter has 1-2 half-decent riffs in their brought low by the mix of bad Friden style rasps and soaring melodic Hetfield vocals. The latter half of the record is just about as bleak as the former, with the title track offering no impact, ANOTHER instrumental acoustic piece in "Ashes", and something like "Absent" just pulling off another mix of In Flames and Sentenced that lacks in the writing.

I'd like to say Insect Song is an improvement over its predecessor, but despite the increase in production standards (courtesy of Ken from Unearth), the music is actually worse, with treacherously dull riff and predictable melodies for the majority of 43 minutes. The vocals are diverse, but annoying, which is the pitfall of so many US metalcore and melodeath bands striving to find an identity in the shadows of their betters. It's a more diverse offering in general than Against the Elements, but here that is not a favorable measure. The band has been fairly quiet for the past 5-6 years, so they could be on the verge of disappearing into time, their two albums having long preceded them into that void. Yet, one hopes that there is still something more impressive below the surface which they've yet to deliver us: a black eye, bruised cheek or a fat lip.

Verdict: Epic Fail [1.75/10]

http://www.myspace.com/beyondtheembrace

Beyond the Embrace - Against the Elements (2002)

Imitation is the sincerest form of attempting to turn a profit through a willing audience, whilst you simultaneously pull the wool down over its eyes. In the case of Massachusetts' Beyond the Embrace, the design was not only to emulate their Swedish heroes In Flames, but also up the ante a bit. This was to be accomplished by adding a third guitar player to the roster. So the same dual leads you heard from the European heroes can come off stronger in the live arena, with a rhythm guitar still chugging away beneath them, or the band could simply rip out a triple harmony. In principle, this is not a bad game plan, and having seen the band live, it's effective enough from the sheer sonic standpoint.

Metal Blade saw this potential, and in the midst of helping snag up ever halfway competent band playing melodic death metal in the wake of the genre's titans (In Flames, Dark Tranquillity, At the Gates, Soilwork, etc), a deal was born. Beyond the Embrace tweaked a bunch of tunes from their s/t 2001 demo and headed out on the same road to success that worked for their state peers All That Remains, Unearth, Shadows Fall, Killswitch Engage, and so forth. Unfortunately, Against the Elements suffers from the same ingredients it so wished to thrive upon, and the album is really just a clone of 1996-2000 era In Flames, with a mix of Anders Friden and James Hetfield vocal styles, lacking all of the power of its 'host' band.

You can't really just string along an entire album of cutesy melodic leads and hope for the best. The reason these worked so wonderfully with In Flames and the other Swedish bands was due to the general uplifting nature of the music, the glorious surge that the traditional metal melodies could take in a head-on collision with the extreme vocals and thundering aggression. Beyond the Embrace are craft enough to write a thousand or so noodling riffs, but the rhythm guitar consistently sucks, and the result is the band sounds half like Sum 41 or Blink 182 with Trivium + Anders vocals and metal guitar leads. Listen to a song like "Mourning in Magenta", which is basically four chord rock tripe which would only be fit for the Warped Tour second stage. "Compass" gives me the same feel of momentum as At the Gate's "Slaughter of the Soul", only in placed of the 'Go!' break they segue into another set of melodies and awful, howling vocals and tapping which might actually have worked wonders in a better song.

The tragedy is that the album never really gets much better than this, and quickly sinks into a footnote, just another band trying to cash in on a popular sound. Like the intro to "Moonshield" or the instrumental "The Jester's Dance" from The Jester Race, Beyond the Embrace try to show their somber, 'deep' side with the acoustic/lead instrumental "Drowning Sun", but it comes across an exercise in futility. "Rapture", "Release", and "The Bending Sea" have between them enough decent riffs to fill out a filler track on Come Clarity, and the remainder are even less apt to stir the fire within, as the band's creative benefactors once did. The vocals never strike out into their own identity, too much the product of this guy's hard-on for half of his CD collection.

The production isn't great either, but that's hardly the straw that breaks this camel's back. This camel never even got his bit and bridle, he fell ill and was executed before transporting a single man across the desert. The lyrics are the same personal, existential morass of 'emo with heavy guitars' that so many melodeath bands vomit forth. Life is such a burden. Call my psychiatrist. There is no doubt that the members of Beyond the Embrace can perform their instruments well enough, even through emulation, but they're such an uninspiring, safe knockoff here that I found absolutely no moments of release in this debut. That they got any attention at all seems to have been a simple benefit of being in the right place at the right time, a time when labels were desperately seeking the repeated success of European bands that had struck gold in the 90s, only culling these doppelgangers from the escalating US scene.

Verdict: Epic Fail [2/10]

http://www.myspace.com/beyondtheembrace