Alesana - The Emptiness (Review)

Artist: Alesana
Album: The Emptiness
Label: Fearless Records
Release Date: January 26^th
Genre: Post-hardcore
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Rating:

Webster’s Dictionary defines “empti­ness” as some­thing “lack­ing real­ity, sub­stance, mean­ing, or value or lack­ing pur­pose or result” (I’m sure you’ve never heard an open­ing quite like that before). It also hap­pens to be the name of Alesana’s third stu­dio offer­ing. What do these two things have in com­mon? Well, the def­i­n­i­tion of the word describes the album to a tee. The Emptiness is just that.

After dab­bling in Greek mythol­ogy (2006’s On Frail Wings of Vanity and Wax) and folk tales (2008’s Where Myth Fades To Legend), Alesana finally decided to be inven­tive. The band pro­duced a con­cept album based on an orig­i­nal story. The grue­some tale revolves around a sketch artist in late 19^th cen­tury England and his lover, Annabel, who was mur­dered whilst they slept. Each song is a new chap­ter in the 50-minute saga. The first song, “Curse of the Virgin Canvas,” begins with a spo­ken word seg­ment that intro­duces the story, one that “will tor­ture your thoughts by day/and poi­son your dreams by night/there are no words that can be writ­ten that can describe the stark and utter hor­ror.” The band not only described the story that will fol­low, but the listener’s prob­a­ble reac­tion upon hear­ing the rest of the album.

To a lesser extent, there is some sem­blance of time travel involved in the story, which is fit­ting for Alesana because the band is stuck in a world of met­al­core past. The for­mula of duel­ing, har­mo­niz­ing gui­tars, dis­placed growls and pitchy vocals was preva­lent in 2005, but most bands com­pa­ra­ble to Alesana have since pro­gressed. Every song adheres to some vari­a­tion of this for­mula. Vocalist Dennis Lee’s screams are both mis­placed and mis­er­able. He sounds like an awful mash-up of The Number 12 Looks Like You’s Jase Korman and Bring Me The Horizon’s Oliver Sykes. Nothing on the album par­tic­u­larly stands out. There are trade-off vocals aplenty (the band has four capa­ble vocal­ists, but only two stand out) and mud­dled break­downs that will gar­ner more snick­ers than mosh pits. Credit must be given to Alesana for try­ing to step out­side of the box and con­ceiv­ing a cre­ative story from scratch. Yet, it comes off so hack­neyed that it is hard to take The Emptiness seriously.

Alesana has once again attempted to break through the glass ceil­ing, but yet can­not even make a crack. The band seems des­tined to remain on the out­side look­ing in unless a seri­ous musi­cal mat­u­ra­tion process takes place. In the mean time, how­ever, Alesana has yet to prove why it belongs in today’s scene. The afore­men­tioned spo­ken word seg­ment ends with the short quip, “The empti­ness will haunt you.” It sure will.

Track Listing:
1. Curse Of The Virgin Canvas
2. The Artist
3. A Lunatic’s Lament
4. The Murderer
5. Hymn For The Shameless
6. The Thespian
7. Heavy Hangs The Albatross
8. The Lover
9. In Her Tomb By The Sounding Sea
10. To Be Scared By An Owl
11. Annabel

Similar To: Blessthefall, Silverstein, A Skylit Drive

Review by: Adam V.

1. Stream The Emptiness
2. Alesana: Yours To Pre-Order
3. Alesana Tour Announcement
4. Alesana Are Scared Of Owls…
5. Alesana Studio Update x 4