A few months ago I received a copy of Revelations of the Unsung by The Autumn Offering with the thought that the next album would be released very soon. And look at this, the guys have kept their promises. This time, a full-length album is the result of the rehearsal times leaving nothing to the imagination that The Autumn Offering is here to stay.

Metalcore is a genre that took a lot of bands to come up with what I call ‘perfect use of the lower E, D or even B-string’ resulting in both the rise of lots of new bands but also existing bands took a change in their styles.

 

The Autumn Offering provides a psychedelic journey through this scene starting with a 30 second prologue to build up the tensions in order to be able to explode right from the first real song 'Decay'. The guitars together are simply schizophrenic and, very important, not just pounding those lower strings. The second song, 'The Yearning' also contains this mentally illness by combining both high and low tunes with all kinds of variations in speed. Then double bass, single bass and quick changes in this component will make the metalcore-fan start to cheer. So far, a good start.

 

The bad thing about the record is the fact that the album has got too many ups and downs. In my opinion, the chorus of 'Embrace The Gutter' is pretty boring with a basic four chord structure shows up, allowing the singer (who has got a brutal voice by the way) to sing. That is, using this angry voice to hold on to notes for longer than one and a half second. 'Misery' seems to be a typical example of an album-filler with an impossible to understand, short guitar solo whereas 'Ghost' could well be one of the best metalcore songs I’ve ever heard. The rest of the album is a little bit of the same, some very great heavy music varied with too typical things.

 

However, the album contains the most important ingredient of metalcore. Fucking heavy break downs with a perfectly produced sound. For the future, The Autumn Offering could well be the next big thing. For now, we’ll just have to be satisfied with half of the album but the improvement since Revelations of the Unsung is clearly noticeable.