I have to admit, I’m a bit ambivalent towards the debut from Cincinnati’s deathcore merchants and their debut; On one hand, the ‘death’ side of the core such as the rumbling breakdowns blackened shriekds and especially the deeper growls of vocalist Joey Nelson are solid and on par with any of the current deathcore scene. On the other hand, the obvious injections of clean emo vocals, cliched At The Gates thrash and synths, are a bit redundant, and sort of …Victory-fied. It’s almost like Victory Records sat around and said “OK, the kids like the breakdowns, the girls like the clean vox and older dudes like deep vocals-who can we sign that does all of that?”
Enter Beneath The Sky. If you take this record simply at face value, it’s not at all bad, and for the genre, certainly above average, but it seems such an obvious dichotomy between death core heft and clean emo/pop, more so than label mates A Day To Remember. It’s like Victory Records put all their past and present bands from all genres in a blender and Beneath the Sky came out. For example, the start of opening track “Goodfellas” is utterly devastating and is one of the better examples of deathcore around, with Joey Nelson’s truly impressive bellow. The scattered throughout the album are plenty of moments of pummeling heaviness like “Our Last Road”, “The Reason” and the Glamour of Corruption”, but then there’s just an awful lot of commercial pap like the chorus of “How the Times Have Changed”, “For Each Remembered Name” and “Grave Mistake”, both often mixed within tracks (i.e “Being In a Coma Is Hell Carried On”, “Falling In Love With Cold Hands”) that could be With Dead Hands Rising mixed with Taking Back Sunday.
Overall, What Demons Do to Saints is a decent effort and to their credit though, the band avoid the acoustic cliché or ballad and keep thinks lyrically simple, though I still have no idea what it is exactly that demons do to saints. Give them noogies? Purple Nurples?

[Visit the band's website]

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