Evergreen Terrace

Almost Home

[3.5/5]

With 2007’s Wolfbiker, Jacksonville’s Evergreen Terrace found the perfect distillation of their metalcore sound, ensuring that every beefy riff landed with sledgehammer force while their choruses climbed to previously untapped levels of glorious fist-in-the-air drama. Two years later and they’re back with more of the same–and that’s not meant as a slight, but rather an affirmation of their skill when it comes to this stuff, as they’ve pushed themselves to deliver even crunchier chuggery and bludgeon while writing some of the strongest melodies of their career.



“Enemy Sex” and “The Letdown” display the band at their angriest, snarling with the kind of bile-soaked vitriol that just can’t be faked, and if nothing else, they make it extremely clear that they can throw down with the best of them. Likewise, their choruses explode powerfully, but it works in the band’s favor that they never feel forced, allowing them to breathe and take the song where it needs to go. Guitarist Craig Chaney’s clean vocals–which bear a strong resemblance to those of Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus–give the choruses real warmth, and similarly, his guitar leads erupt at the perfect moment and take the songs to a new level.



Of the 11 tracks, there are perhaps two or three which fail to ignite in the way the others do, but these are still not bad songs, and any quibbles over the consistency of the record are rendered redundant by closer “Not Good Enough,” one of the best chunks of melodic metal to emerge in ’09. Boasting typically thick riffs with gorgeously echoing and textured guitar squalls alongside a titanic breakdown and from-the-gut vocals, everything about the track is infused with a sense of desperate urgency, and it’s the kind of song that should bring a record like this to its climax, reaching stratospheric heights while inciting the listener to burn off every ounce of energy they have left in them. (METAL BLADE) Dan Slessor

GO DOWNLOAD: “Not Good Enough”