Horizons Parkway Drive Artist

Strictly all-meat-no-filler metalcore, the second album by Australian outfit {|Parkway Drive|} is the sort of solidly efficient album that keeps terms like solidly efficient from sounding like faint praise. The five-piece led by singer {|Winston McCa... Read more

Strictly all-meat-no-filler metalcore, the second album by Australian outfit {|Parkway Drive|} is the sort of solidly efficient album that keeps terms like solidly efficient from sounding like faint praise. The five-piece led by singer {|Winston McCall|}, along with producer {|Adam Dutkiewicz|} (who between his ongoing tenure in {|Killswitch Engage|} and his side career as one of metalcore's most in-demand producers is turning into the style's equivalent of high-profile indie producer {|Chris Walla|}), keep the songs stripped down to bare essentials, right down to the largely under three-minute song lengths. Similarly, {|McCall|}'s vocals avoid the more comical extremes of the traditional metalcore bark while maintaining a suitably aggressive presence, while the band's lockstep rhythm section (bassist {|Jia O'Connor|} and drummer {|Ben Gordon|}) and unison-riff specialist guitarists {|Jeff Ling|} and {|Luke Kilpatrick|} fire off each track with enough energy to compensate for the general sameness of approach. As a result, {|Horizons|} is strictly by the book metalcore, but delivered with enough talent and passion to put across a set of songs that might easily come off as samey and dull in less capable hands. ~ Stewart Mason Less