If you still haven’t had your fill of Australian bands, here’s another one that should satisfy. Prepared Like A Bride is from Gold Coast, Australia and have released their second EP, A Dangerous Journey. While this EP may only be five tracks that total up to nearly eighteen minutes, it is not an eighteen minutes that will be wasted.
Prepared Like A Bride may call themselves progressive metalcore, but there are a slew of different metalcore, deathcore, and melodic hardcore influences in their music. The vocals on A Dangerous Journey are wonderfully brutal at all times. The vocalist goes all over the map between lows and highs and does it masterfully. The lyrics, while mostly being Christian, are very well written. The guitars are usually chugging but when the lead goes off into a melodic tangent, it sounds fantastic. The drumming is masked behind everything else for the most part but is still heard and has a nice tone. The drummer always lays down a nice beat but rarely does anything too fancy on the kit.
The first track “The Valley of Shadow and Death” has no hesitation about coming right in and hitting you hard. The beginning of this track might seem a little bland at first but it really picks up quickly when the guitar lead kicks in. This song sounds more like melodic hardcore and at first I thought Prepared Like A Bride had switched genres on me. The spoken parts in this song sound like Emmure and could have been done without.
The third track, “The Interpreter’s House”, has a very good atmospheric opening that leads up into a fast part that has me throwing up the horns. However, this track turns out to be the weakest on A Dangerous Journey because the rest of the song is just chugging that that doesn’t compliment the vocals too well. Overall, this song just doesn’t do it for me and I wasn’t overly impressed.
The final track “The Slough of Despond”, is an excellent ending to the EP and my favorite song. The melodic guitar in this song really holds my attention and makes this song stand out. The vocals here are at the top of their game. This entire song has me banging my head, despite the fact that I rarely ever listen to this genre anymore. The track fades out with an exotic outro and leaves me wanting more.
Prepared Like A Bride really knows how to throw in Born of Osiris sounding synth parts and make it sound on par with the rest of the music. The synth really creates an entire new level of atmosphere and is a step up from their last EP entitled Within World’s Apart, but the synth isn’t the only thing that has improved. Everything from the production to the vocals, guitar, and drumming have gotten much better. The band has shown a lot of growth since their previous work.
There are a couple of things on A Dangerous Journey that could have been much better. For starters, there are lots of “djenty” parts that just don’t sound right when jumbled in with everything else. Some bands have really made a name for themselves using this sound but I don’t see that happening with Prepared Like A Bride. Another thing is the frequent use of breakdowns and chugging. This band has shown that they can sit down and really write some mean melodic leads and music, yet they still throw in breakdowns all over the place.
Prepared Like A Bride has greatly improved and I only see more improvement in their future. A Dangerous Journey is really worth the listen for fans of metalcore and deathcore. It may not be anything new but it is something good. I’m eagerly waiting to see what other surprises Australia has in store for us.
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