Brides is a relatively new British band on Visible Noise, home to Bring Me The Horizon, Lostprophets, Bullet For My Valentine and other renowned names. The band blends many different styles into a mixture of what people like to call post-hardcore. The band resembles sounds of A Wilhelm Scream, Hot Water Music, Misery Signals and others and is destined to become big. Media like Rocksound and Kerrang judged their debut album Ocular.Unveil very positively and so here’s my chance to do so as well…or not.

 

I gotta admit it took my quite some spins to get used to the music on this disc. Especially the dual vocals take a lot of time to get to you. There is one dude mainly handling melodic, clean vocals and there’s a screamer within this quartet. Sometimes they provide the listener dual vocal attacks, other times you get to hear only one of the singers. What makes it a bit hard to digest though, are the transitions between the two styles of singing. Sometimes I just feel like the sudden change between the styles divides the song into two pieces, making the song sound like it’s not a coherent piece of heavy music. Fortunately this ‘problem’ doesn’t occur too often but I guess you should listen to ‘Serpent, I’m Nothing But Your Anchor’ to hear what I mean.

 

Furthermore there is a lot of things to be discovered on Ocular.Unveil. With so many styles combined, there is always something to attract your attention. The songs are mainly up-tempo, which makes for an energetic ride that lasts little under 25 minutes. But one thing becomes very obvious on this album, Brides is not your average hyped British metalcore band. The band does enough to keep things interesting throughout the entire album, with progressive elements, hardcore, metal, punk and rock influences and just the right dose of enthusiastic energy.

 

If the aforementioned bands are your thing, I think this album is absolutely one to check out as well. Fans of Gallows, Architects (earlier work) and Devil Sold His Soul will probably dig this shit as well. Post-hardcore it is you like? Good, knock yourselves out on this one!