Solace and Stable are self-proclaimed “progressive metalcore bruisers” from Kansas City. What I heard after a deliberate start was an explosion into brutal death growls with incongruous colourful technicality going on in the background.

There’s a touch of Suspyre there, I thought. My initial reaction: it’s ok, but it doesn’t sound very co-ordinated. We move on to “American Beauty”, which I take to be an ironic track title. The growling rant goes on. The official description of what I’m listening to is “aggressively focussed and fast-paced endeavour that teeters between chaos and melodic beauty with subtlety and attention to craft”. I’m still looking for the melodic beauty but I acknowledge the aggression and the chaos, if the disharmony of technical anarchy and screams count as chaos.

I sensed a quest for emotional height on “Alive in Brokenness” but it doesn’t hang around. This is an intense album with a permanently cold heart, if it has a heart at all. Then at last, there’s a chilled-out passage, but such warmth is fleeting as we’re straight back to the same old monotony. They give it plenty, I’ll say that. The drummer batters away twenty to the dozen, the vocalist sounds like he’s very angry, and the guitarist is having his own private ball. Call it progressive if you like but for me it’s not glued together.

I decided to check the lyrics – this is a very wordy affair – for inspiration. Technical thrash accompanied my reading, which in summary was about the shallowness of man and what follows life: “moving forward inciting all that I have to maintain worthiness with God’s direction”. The music meanwhile drags on in its inexorable way. I found myself overwhelmed by growled words and plenty of them, technicality abounds but it’s all in the same pattern and it’s still not hanging together. Please can I have some variety? Six tracks on from the previous welcome interlude, there’s another brief moment of respite on “The Hollow Present” but we return quickly to the technical battery factory. It’s like a production line. I warn you: endurance is required. As so often happens, the album finishes brightly, begging the eternal question as to why the torpor could not have been relieved much earlier.

Awful. The mark I give is for commitment, as this musical cacophony which I failed to appreciate clearly means something to the guys of Solace and Stable. If “The Systematic Erosion of Integrity” is more “aesthetically pleasing” (their words) than their previous album, then my imagination cannot stretch to picture what that might be like. No, thanks.

(2.5 / 10 Andrew Doherty)

www.myspace.com/solaceandstable