Honour Crest

Spilled Ink

Written by: MBC on 05/05/2014 17:33:09

Virginia-based metalcore band Honour Crest released their album “Spilled Ink” on Rise Records at the end of last year. With their melodic approach to metalcore mixed with synths, Honour Crest fit right in with other teen/scene favourites such as Asking Alexandria or We Came As Romans and unfortunately is another superfluous release in the cesspool of generic metalcore. “Spilled Ink” contains eleven songs (including one short instrumental track) of mediocre monotony. All the songs contain switches back and forth between screamed and cleanly sung vocals and neither the screaming nor the singing contains anything of noteworthy quality. The screams are decent, but monotonous mid-to-highs that sound forced and the cleans are flat emo-pop without real emotion.

Honour Crest’s song writing is not formulaic in the sense that the songs are not built around a clear verse-chorus-verse-chorus progression all the time, which is good as it should keep the songs from getting too repetitive. However, since the switches between the screams and clean vocals are so frequent and tedious, the songs end up sounding incredibly formulaic anyway. The song “In Irons” is an instrumental track based on synths. It has an epic feel to it and might have worked well as an introduction instead of being in the middle of the album or otherwise, if it had built up to a great song. It leads into the track “Mountains”, where the build-up falls completely flat and the song becomes another chug-fest with pop vocals.

At times the album does contain some pretty good guitar work, but most of the time the songs consist of boring chug-riffs and breakdowns, again contributing to the feel of mediocrity that surrounds the album. A saving grace is the lyrics which are actually pretty good with themes of pain and perseverance. Here is an example from “Bridges”: “Find meaning behind this life. All this talk of incomplete bridges, don't be scared of the future because your past will catch up. And break apart the foundations you laid, don't regret your goals, don't let these feelings subside

Plainly though, “Spilled Ink” is not a horrible album, but it sure is not great either.

Download: Spilled Ink, Origin, Bridges
For the fans of: Asking Alexandria, We Came As Romans, Memphis May Fire
Listen: Facebook

Release date 10.12.2013
Rise Records

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