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Architects - Hollow Crown

How Brighton’s Architects – or Architects UK for our readers to the left of the Atlantic...

Rating: 8

How Brighton’s Architects – or Architects UK for our readers to the left of the Atlantic – have managed to stand out from the suffocating crowd of metal / hardcore outfits influenced by Meshuggah’s low-end guitar lurch, the throat-shredding howl of Converge’s Jake Bannon, The Dillinger Escape Plan’s staccato one-two rhythms and breakdowns from the state of Massachusetts is its own mystery. The number of upstarts cut from this cloth putting “new songs up” daily on Myspace is only proportionally rivalled by American military spending in Iraq, but good on the Searle brothers and their mates for hitting the road and getting in people’s faces. This is the key to ‘Hollow Crown’; the album is well-written with its share of powerful riffing (notably, ‘Early Grave’, ‘Dead March’ and ‘One Of These Days’), but it’s the bristling live energy that makes it that much more interesting than many of their faceless peers; especially in a fling-your-body-around-the-living-room fashion as vocalist Sam Carter sounds like he’s deliberately screaming and spitting on punters in a Derby toilet venue and the guitars sling-shot between down-tuned rumble and melodic punk moods. The quintet may have avoided falling into a pit of irrelevant monotony with ‘Hollow Crown’’s fairly strong showing, though it’ll be interesting to see where they go from here.

Kevin Stewart-Panko