‘Redemption’ is Before Their Eyes fourth full album release and features a sound familiar to fans of their earlier releases. For the uninitiated, Before Their Eyes have a sound that sits somewhere between screamo and post-hardcore but with a distinct electronic influence also apparent. Prior to this album’s release, they toured relentlessly with bands like Forever The Sickest Kids, Drop Dead, Gorgeous and Breathe Carolina. The band fall into the grey area between these bands and produce music with a range of influences.

The record opens broodingly before launching into ’Lies’ which shows the band at their most powerful. They move effortlessly between heavier breakdowns with screamo vocals and more melodic, pop-punky moments. It is with credit to Before Their Eyes that they can aspire to such a heavy sound and yet still have time for the more melodic moments. The vocals are strong and the band sound accomplished and confident with catchy choruses infecting the whole album.

Lyrically, Before Their Eyes do not tread new ground and the cliché of talking about ex-girlfriends and painful break-ups is dutifully ticked off in Revenge.

This is a record with grandiose ambition, with each track sounding as though it has been given a lot of thought. Multi-layered tracks like ’Dream’ show off heavy guitar riffs with polished vocals, switching between smooth melodic verses and more metal-inspired breakdowns. Both the vocals and guitar here sound heavily produced and it lends the record a degree of slickness.

However, by the time the title-track ’Redemption’ rolls around at about the halfway point in the album, the highly produced sound has begun to grate and each track seems to merge together, with little variety. In fact there is very little distinctive about this record at all and by the time the album closes with ’Backstabber’ it has lost any of its’ original energy.

This is a record with a lot of production on it. The entire sound is very polished but sometimes overly so and this begins to detract from the record as a whole. The highly processed sound does not compliment the band on record as they try to straddle too many sounds at once. Overall, this album is listenable to a fan of the genre but is not going to win many more converts for Before Their Eyes anytime soon. A painting-by-numbers album and a wasted opportunity.

2/5

‘Redemption’ by Before Their Eyes is available now on Invogue Records.

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Words by Tom White (@whiteywitters)