The Always Open Mouth

by Peter Aleksa

Since their 2003 debut Odd How People Shake, Fear Before the March of Flames has fast become one of the most respected and innovative bands in today’s hardcore scene. And with their highly anticipated third album, The Always Open Mouth, released September 19^th on Equal Vision Records, the band is poised to make some serious waves.

Fear Before the March of Flames has really created something unique with The Always Open Mouth, a dense sonic landscape full of haunting piano melodies, anguished screams, singsong vocals, spoken word samples, breakdowns, and ambient noisecore. The band has really broadened their sound on this album, layering a myriad of synthesizer parts, delayed guitars, and multiple vocals to create a dense, rich sound. And unlike some hardcore bands who just hold a few keyboard chords with the default settings on a Korg, the use of keyboards and piano is done astoundingly well on this album, blending perfectly with the host of effect laden guitar parts and driving bass lines, as the whole mixed media collage of sound is punctured perfectly by Brandon’s stabbing drumbeats.

As the band shifts genres at ADD speed, they seamlessly combine elements of a host of diverse musical styles to form something that sounds like many different bands, but like nothing else at the same time. Songs like the crushingly heavy “Drowning the Old Hag” and “A Gift For Fiction” offer a new take on the breakdown-driven sound Fear demonstrated on their last album, Art Damage. While sections of music like the electronic techno babble and catchy hooks of “My (Fucking) Deer Hunter,” which features guest vocals from Anthony Green of Circa Survive, and the odd timed grind and stoned out heavy metal of “A Brief Tutorial in Bachanalia,” similarly give an altogether familiar feel to the album. And yet, paradoxically, it is somehow unsettlingly different, like the way that people and places in dreams become distorted.

Lyrically, the album is a haunting tale, like stepping through the looking glass into a discomforting vision of a future gone terribly wrong. A nightmarish take on who we’ve become and who we are on track to become, the album abounds with themes of repression, apathy, greed, rampant materialism, drug abuse, and the disintegration of the modern family. On “Mouth,” the lyrics anguish about the lack of discourse in modern society, “Anything to numb/ anything to encourage ignorance/ anything to put us to sleep,” and later rant about our coddled existence and generational apathy, “Someone/ anyone/ take off your shirt/ and pacify/ make it easy for us to eat/ easy for us to sleep/ someone/ anyone/ take us out back/ and put us down/ I think we deserve it.”

There is also an excellent usage of unnatural imagery to unnerve the listener, such as in “Dog Sized Bird,” “Have you seen me lately/ I am the dog sized bird on the tracks/ I have an unhealthy handful of options/ and a couple of trains on my back.” The chillingly apocalyptic predictions in “Taking Cassandra to the End of the World Party” further the unsettling tone of the album, “At six miles up you will explode/ I can see it all/ at sea level you will be drowned/ I have seen it all/ beneath the surface the monster will have you/ I can see it all/ but God damned no one will believe me.” Such lyrics echo the dilemma of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, questioning whether, in a world predicated on certain illusions, being the only person able to see the truth would make you appear insane.

Some of the most insightful lyrics on the album can be found in the track “High As A Horse,” which examines our modern drone like existence, as we dull our senses with pharmaceutical dependencies and mindless television. Commenting on the systematic fleecing of the american public, Adam and Dave sing, “If we give the horses blinders/ they won’t see the approaching ledge/ too much time and effort spent on just another bridge.” And by accusing, “We trust the local doctor/ we trust the medicine/ our child gets a scratch/ we give our child a brand new head/ we eat what’s on our plate/ we drink what’s in our cup/ we like the shiny TV screen/ it spits/ we lap it up... There’s no need to talk/ when we have medicine/ there’s a pill for every fucked up thought/ and a cure for every fucked up child,” they capture perfectly our reliance on modern comforts to supplement unfulfilled existential desires as well as the epidemic of overmedicating American youth.

The high point of the album by far, though, has to be the brilliant two-song tandem of “Complete and Utter Confusion” and “...As A Result Of Signals Being Crossed.” Here, the band’s new blend of ambience and brutality is at its most stunning. In “Complete and Utter Confusion” vocals sweetly soar over a mix of piano, clean guitar, and electronic blips, “There’s a man from the afterlife/ at the door trying to sell us hope,” before brutal screams coming crashing down on the listener with, “Lock the doors/ and close the windows.” The song continues to alternate between sugary, dancey atmospheres and heavy rock, before finally fading out in a sea of feedback. Which, is where the companion track “...As A Result Of Signals Crossed” picks up, continuing the religious and salesman motifs of the previous track, as well as the masterful shift between beautiful instrumental arrangements and calculated brutality.

Throughout the album, the band makes use of repeated imagery and lyrics, such as, “What you see/ and what you believe/ are never going to be the same,” appearing in both “Drowning the Old Hag” and “...As a Result of Signals Being Crossed,” that help tie the album together into one big fucked up portrait. This is furthered by the continuity between the opening track “Absolute Future” and the closing track “Absolute Past,” with their repeated refrains of “Everything will not be made right.” The album artwork, designed by drummer Brandon Proff, features unsettling mashups of portraits of individuals, cityscapes, and productivity charts that embody the thematic elements of modern life encroaching on humanity that is representative of the overall tone of the album.

Pick up The Always Open Mouth now, it’s one of the most unique and rewarding albums in recent memory, and probably the only album you’ll find worth listening to in quite some time.