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I Hope To God You Feel This Now: UNDERØATH's Define the Great Line, 10 years later

If anything can be said for Define the Great Line, purely from a contextual standpoint and without any prior knowledge of Underoath whatsoever, it's that it is an album that succeeded almost entirely in spite of itself. Consider this: It is the fifth studio album from a band that, until this crucial turning point, were in a constant state of flux. Aside from their drummer/vocalist Aaron Gillespie, no one else from the band's original 1997 lineup survived to see the release of this album some nine years later. These transitional pains lay not just within the band's immediate personnel, either, but through its stylistic approach.

Across three albums with vocalist Dallas Taylor at the helm, the band put their name to exhaustive track lengths, roughly executed metal passages and an uncertainty in their sound. Changes came, but with trepidation and subsequently middling results: “Had the band managed to seamlessly incorporate such experimentations into the songs,” noted AP in our  review of 2002's The Changing Of Times, “they’d have been onto something.”

By the time the band's best-known line-up—Gillespie, vocalist Spencer Chamberlain, guitarists Timothy McTague and James Smith, bassist Grant Brandell and keyboardist Christopher Dudley—came into formation circa 2003, it became apparent that a complete overhaul was needed in order to progress. As popular as 2004's They're Only Chasing Safety proved to be among a new audience, one cannot help but retrospectively feel as though they had thrown out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. With a far greater emphasis on hooks and choruses, tracks like “Reinventing Your Exit” and “A Boy Brushed Red…” slid in comfortably next to other emo anthems of the day on playlists and compilations alike.

“If anything can be said for Define the Great Line, purely from a contextual standpoint and without any prior knowledge of Underoath whatsoever, it's that it is an album that succeeded almost entirely in spite of itself.

It was a world away from the overbearing, trudging and methodical mannerisms of the band's early work, which came with both good and bad points. Certainly, by reconstructing Underoath from the ground up, Gillespie was able to properly find his voice within the fold—quite literally—and subsequently set the band on the right creative path. By the same token, however, it meant that the innermost anguish that had drawn people to Underoath in the first place had been lost over the sound of squeaky-clean production and catchy melodies.

Define the Great Line changed that. For everything that Underoath had been through to that very point—every line-up shift, every 10-plus-minute mistake, every shift of their foundation made on a trial-and-error basis—had lead up to this moment. The result was not only Underoath's defining LP, but one of the most memorable heavy releases of the 2000s. Transcending faith and genre semantics, the adulation this record received speaks volumes of how far their reach had become.

There were several key factors to the album's success. With a line-up finally cemented, the core sextet were able to navigate the connectivity between each of them with confidence and a newfound sense of trust. This was particularly the case as far as the vocal interplay of both Gillespie and Chamberlain was concerned. A primary issue of They're Only Chasing Safety was the blunt, stop-start dynamics—or lack thereof—between the two vocalists. Often on that record, it felt as though both were singing and screaming, respectively, for the fences in order to be heard over one another. With Define the Great Line, however, came a full realization of just how remarkably the two are able to complement one another.

This goes far beyond the usual scream/clean dual vocalist set-up where the former does the hard yards in the verses to set up the latter for the all-important chorus. Rather, Gillespie and Chamberlain work off one another consistently throughout Definesomething that could only have been bolstered by the fact that both were contributing lyrically on top of that. You don't need to look further than the album's opener, “In Regards To Myself,” to note this duality at work. By serving as the yin to the other's yang, the two create a complete portrait of the second-person narrative.

“For all the bands that would go on to attempt to replicate what was achieved on Define, it should be stressed that very few came close to sounding quite like this record did in the years that followed.”

“You're busy living now, aren't you?” questions Gillespie, daring a response. Chamberlain shoots back instantly, unleashing a definitive and guttural “No.” Gillespie persists: “You're busy making vows/You're coming unglued.” This then builds into the next passageway, hitting a crescendo in the process. Through this dialogue comes resolve—and, in turn, a sense of completion.

In “There Could Be Nothing After This,” the verse that brings the song home is an overlay of both vocalists relaying what is ostensibly two sides of the same coin: Chamberlain roars about seeing his life “in the eyes of [his] ghost,” while Chamberlain reflects by repeating the mantra-like refrain: “This is for you/and your hopeless case.” Through the album's concluding track, “To Whom It May Concern,” Gillespie leads the way: “At the end of the road/You'll find what you've been waiting for.” However, he leaves one of the song's—and, in turn, the album's—most succinct and striking lyrics to Chamberlain. Those words? “End cycle.”

Even through these mere tid-bits of lyrics, one is able to ascertain the album's distressed, often furious tone. This is, after all, an album that opens with cries of “Wake up! Wake up!” and “This is not a test!” The sky is falling in around both Chamberlain and Gillespie, and it's going to take a lot to turn things around. It's an album of unfathomable distances, of seeking light in times of pitch darkness and keeping faith through despair. By holding true to what has gotten the album's protagonist—the abstract “you”—through all hardships, it is then and only then that they will be able to, as is repeated at the album's final moments, “end cycle.”

Indeed, the band's faith has remained an elephant in the room for nearly their entire lifespan—certainly not helped by reprehensible lyrics from their early days (a sample from Act of Depression's “Burden in Your Hands”: “You should have thought about the baby before you had sex/Because you have destroyed a gift from God.”) Here, they learn to deal with it on simultaneously broader and more subtle terms – for one, the use of “God” in pure exasperation (“Oh God! Everything! Everything!,” “Oh my God, I hate the me that I've become”). In doing so, a higher being plays into the narrative itself—the protagonist practically shouting at the heavens, begging to be heard.

Define the Great Line is, for lack of a better term, inescapable. Once you're in, there is no way out.”

In “Moving For The Sake Of Motion,” a crisis of faith is addressed by laying it all out on the line, only to ultimately place blame entirely on their own head. “I don't think I could fix this,” confesses Gillespie. “Don't think I could change.” He is then met with a counterpoint by Chamberlain, again factoring in their inextricable link as the voices of the band. “But that's the problem,” he refutes: “We never speak to Him.” For every shattering reality that weighs one down, Define cohesively reasons, it cannot be outmatched when there is something larger than comprehension at work. Regardless of where one's faith lies, it's presented with such conviction and honesty that you're flat-out unable to deny its place at the table.

Of course, all of this is certainly helped by the fact that not only are the band firing on all cylinders, they have a key outside influence watching over them. No, not in that way: We're talking about Killswitch Engage guitarist and producer to the heavily-inclined stars, Adam Dutkiewicz, as well as producer/engineer Matt Goldman. Both were entirely new to the Underoath process, and in many ways that helped to shape the sound of Define the Great Line: At once incessant and forceful, and yet somehow still shrouded in enough ambience to lend a sense of mystique. Just as you think it's safe—a pause for breath, a brief moment stranded along in the midst of the desert—a battering drumfill awakes the sleeping giant, with a twin-pronged attack of gnashing, discordant guitars rounding out the aural assault.

For all the bands that would go on to attempt to replicate what was achieved on Define, it should be stressed that very few came close to sounding quite like this record did in the years that followed. Even in the moments that it appears to be letting up on its tonal heaviness, it instead creeps into the lingering burn of the otherwise quieter moments. Define the Great Line is, for lack of a better term, inescapable. Once you're in, there is no way out.

Perhaps the heights of Define the Great Line proved to be too lofty for Underoath, at least looking back upon the decade that followed—its 2008 followup, Lost in the Sound of Separation, reunited the band with both Dutkiewicz and Goldman to sturdy but comparatively-lesser results; while the departure of Gillespie two years after that would prove to be the death knell for many fans, unable to comprehend a band moving forward with no original members. Whatever the case, Define the Great Line deserves its place atop the highest of rankings insofar as the 2000s wave of post-hardcore—and even at that point, a case can be made to do away with genre semantics entirely and simply view it as a landmark heavy release of its era. Through both its chaos and its calm, Define the Great Line stands proudly on what stable ground is left to walk on.

Watch more: 10 Things You Didn't Know: UNDERØATH – Define The Great Line