This review may come as a surprise to some because I had grown out of the post-hardcore/electronic phase about a year ago, but after hearing “You’re Now Manually Breathing” on YouTube, I was excited to hear more from Everyone Dies In Utah and their forthcoming album, Polarities.
Everyone Dies In Utah is a six piece post-hardcore/electronic band haling from Temple, Texas. They signed to Tragic Hero Records in 2010 and released their debut full-length album entitled Seeing Clearly in 2011. Their newest effort, Polarities, sees them take a bit of a different approach without sounding like an entirely different group. Polarities is set to release on July 31st.
“Factor X” kicks off the album with a taste of what’s to come. Impressive cleans that are fairly unique to this genre, screaming reminiscent to that of Micah Kinard (Oh, Sleeper), and good instrumentals. One of the first things that I noticed while listening to Polarities is that the use of synth isn’t as overbearing as it was on previous releases, but it’s still heard frequently enough to please longtime fans.
Two of the tracks that contain a plethora of synth sections are the sixth and eighth tracks, “Synthia, Where’s R2?” and “Party At The Moon Tower”. The title of the former track alone should have given that away, but now you definitely know what to expect. As previously mentioned, I’m not a huge fan of synth-influenced post-hardcore, but “Synthia, Where’s R2?” and “Party At The Moon Tower” had me bobbing my head during the synth sections.
Instrumentally, Polarities is nothing that will make your jaw drop, but there are moments where the guitarists shine. “The View From Here” has some really good guitar leads, albeit they’re a bit too quiet. Most of the album has this issue with the guitar leads and synth, but if you turn your volume up loud enough, you should be able to hear everything well enough. The mixing isn’t done awfully, but it could have been done better so that the aforementioned aspects were more noticeable without having to blow out the listener’s eardrums.
Another aspect that I’d like to talk about a bit more is the singing. I think the clean vocals are unique in a very good way. My favourite parts of Polarities are the choruses which are all extremely catchy. There are a few tracks that are predominantly sang with clean vocals, and as you can imagine, they were some of my favourites of the album. “A Glowing Core Through The Glass Floor”, “Desoto 55”, and “Simply Me 2” are executed perfectly. The first two tracks that I mentioned also have screaming, while “Simply Me 2” is a ballad which flows into the final and title track, “Polarities”, very well. After hearing “It’s over now/It’s over now/We’ve reached the end this time” several times on “Polarities”, the album comes to a close.
Polarities is one of the most surprising albums of 2012 thus far and I am more than glad that I checked it out. The entire 36 minutes impressed me, but the tracks that seemed to stick out the most were “The View From Here”, “A Glowing Core Through The Glass Floor”, “Simply Me 2”, and “Polarities”. Apart from the mixing issues, Everyone Dies In Utah’s Polarities has very few noticeable flaws.
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