OFFICIAL: http://rejectionistfront.com/
Written
by William Elgin, posted by blog admin
Many
music listeners are rightly alarmed by albums and bands who couple a social
relevant message with their music. It drains, all too often, any semblance of
artistry from the band’s work and reduces their compositions to dogmatic aural
broadsides intent to demonize or decry some perceived injustice and neglects
entertaining the audience. New York City’s Rejectionist Front avoids such
pitfalls because they never write about current events in an obvious way and
expend a tremendous amount of effort in writing songs about human issues,
rather than political. Their second album Evolve features twelve songs with
impeccable rock credentials, plenty of sonic bite, and attention grabbing lead
vocals. Rejectionist Front may be politically engaged, but they are far from
artistically inert.
“Ride”
proves that from the first. Rejectionist Front never indulge themselves with
anything as crass as paint by numbers anthems and this is no exception, but it
does have a powerful uplift that many listeners will appreciate and feel
invigorated by. The arrangement has a challenging, busy texture without ever succumbing
to inaccessibility and lead vocalist Michael Perlman matches the exhortative
qualities of the music and lyric quite well. The album’s second track “All I Am”
implies, based on title alone, much more personal lyrical content and doesn’t
disappoint, but the more notable shift comes with the song’s much leaner and
even raucous musical attack. This is real raunch and roll that jettisons much of
the textual attention heard in the opener in favor of a more visceral,
aggressive approach shorn of even the faintest hints of self-indulgence. The
band’s penchant for bringing two and three part harmonies into their vocal
presentation further sets these opening cuts apart and remains a consistent
strength of Evolve as a whole.
There’s
a little less of that vocal wont in the song “Savior”, but Perlman’s pipes are
more than capable of carrying the day for the band and his performance on this
song has an equal amount of muscle and finesse. They do eventually build to a
memorable musical climax on “All is The Same”, but much of the song
demonstrates a more pensive, considered air than the earlier tunes and shows
them as comfortable in that mold as they are with outright rockers. “Reclaim”
is definitely one of Evolve’s more passionate numbers and features one of the
album’s best guitar riffs while the single “Flush” shares much of the same
territory with an impressively inspired tone. They offer up a creative
variation on their foundational sound with the song “Resurrection” and the
rhythm section really gives this penultimate number an extra charge of energy
it might otherwise miss. Rejectionist Front’s second album serves up more of
the qualities that attracted so much attention on their debut, but they’ve
opened things up further with Evolve and sound even more bracing than before.
This is top shelf hard rock for the new century with a message that never risks
making you roll your eyes.
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