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On the Last Day

Meaning in the Static

(Victory; US: 22 Aug 2006; UK: 11 Sep 2006)

AFI meets Aiden… a comparison that will have sullen 13-year-old girls excited, and the rest of us nauseous at the sight of these comb-over sporting emo kids. Although On the Last Day has not (yet) reached the comical level of self-parody of Aiden, they’re still a long, long way from the kind of commercial-friendly melodrama that AFI have cashed in on. The very definition of cookie-cutter post-hardcore, the riffs alternate from limp pop punk to half-assed one-note metalcore breakdowns, the vocals lack both charisma and hooks, the production is lifeless, and the album is a complete and utter failure when it comes to establishing the kind of melancholy mood that emo/screamo thrives upon. “Initial Deployment” and “A Welcome Haunting” has the band finally waking the hell up a half hour into the CD, but by then, it’s a lost cause on an album with little to no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Rating:

Adrien Begrand has been writing for PopMatters since 2002, and has been writing his monthly metal column Blood & Thunder since 2005. His writing has also appeared in Metal Edge, Sick Sounds, Metallian, graphic novelist Joel Orff's Strum and Drang: Great Moments in Rock 'n' Roll, Knoxville Voice, The Kerouac Quarterly, JackMagazine.com, StylusMagazine.com, and StaticMultimedia.com. A contributing writer for Decibel, Terrorizer, and Dominion magazines and senior writer for Hellbound, he resides, blogs, and does the Twitter thing in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.


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On the Last Day -- Meaning in the Static
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