Videoclip of the Month!!!

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

For Today - Portraits

For Today - Portraits

Portraits is For Today’s second studio album and it was released in 2009 by Face Down Records. This album is of the Metalcore genre. This band is a Christian Metalcore band that features some great things in this album. For Today is a fairly impressive band that hasn’t made it into the mainstream scene yet. They have some of the best bass drops I have ever heard in my entire life.

For Today is a relatively unknown Christian Metalcore band. This album features many good things. The vocalist has a very deep growl and when that is in conjunction with the bass drops it creates a very heavy breakdown. I cannot stress how great their breakdowns are, also the drummer plays some awesome beats and can go pretty fast with his double kick. There are heaps of bass drop breakdowns about an average of 3 per song. The song Saul Of Tarsus (The Messenger) is a great example of how awesome their bass drops are. Some may even consider this album as experimental at times. There are so many transitions during the songs and many of the songs are nice and upbeat. This means that this album is definitely not boring at all. Their style is very good, the tunes they can play are amazing and this is fairly rare for an album to be released so quickly and have this kind of quality to it. It just astounds me. Lyrically it is not dark on negative, the majority is all about standing strong and never giving up. The best example of this would have to be in the song Isaiah (The Willing). The vocalist has an awkward way of singing. It sounds very deep but there is very little distortion to it so the words are nice and clear. Because the lyrical themes are positive its good to actually understand the words.

There are basically 2 main zones in each song. There the breakdowns but there are also very melodic parts which are also very well played. A great example of this is the song Nicodemus (The Seeker), it likes to transition between Melodic  parts and Breakdowns but there are other ordinary riffs thrown in there as well.  When you listen to this album it is very rare for a Metalcore song to have atmosphere, a lot have emotion but not atmosphere. There atmosphere is very odd because it sounds kind of serious and dark but not down beat. It’s a hard to describe. They also like group shouting which only adds to this atmosphere made by the music.

This is a great album overall but there a few things that may disappoint some listener. Firstly this isn’t the energetic type of Metalcore, it can get fast at times but other than that it doesn’t really energize me. Also they use the same riffs in different songs a lot of the time, to make it even more repetitive the vocalist doesn’t really change his tone at all during the entire course of album. There is one thing that really let this album down and that is the lack of clean vocals. The clean vocalist is not used very much in this album but when he does, he has the voice of a angle. His best are in the song Ezekiel (The Visionary), they are amazing. I think it is a little sad that they had so much potential to improve this album by a lot simply by adding more clean vocals.

Overall this is a pretty good Metalcore album. It has great clean/growled vocals and they have some of the best bass drop breakdowns I have ever heard. This album isn’t the most energetic album unfortunately and it is a waste to waste the talents possessed by the Clean vocalist. I would recommend this album to anyone who likes Metalcore and Deathcore. I especially recommend this who likes breakdowns because there are some great ones here. I recommend the songs Ezekiel (The Visionary) and Saul Of Tarsus (The Messenger) for anyone who wants to give this band a go. Overall I give this album a 15/20.

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