Bury Your Dead - Beauty and the Breakdown

Bury Your Dead
Beauty and the Breakdown
Victory Records
Grade: A-

A good natured band wrapped in thumping terror that would terrorize the terrorists, and most any populous, Bury Your Dead unleash their heaviest and hardest record on their second full-length for Victory. In the world of heavy, tough-guy hardcore, Bury Your Dead have that certain something special that’s difficult to define but instantly recognizable when comparing movements to contemporaries.

On 2004’s excellent Cover Your Tracks, the Massachusetts’ five-piece named songs after Tom Cruise movies; a rather odd event though it didn’t distract from the brain-rattling attack. This time vocalist Mat Bruso, guitarists Slim and Eric Ellis, drummer Mark Castillo, and bassist Bubble, uses fairy tales for song titles such as “House of Straw,” “Mirror, Mirror…,” and “The Poison Apple.” Yet, Beauty and the Breakdown is not recommended for kids; unless their parents have tattoos on their necks and ubiquitous spider webs on elbows. Recorded in Florida at Audiohammer Studios with Jason Suecof, Bury Your Dead seem to have picked up on the heavier metal side of the game while in the peninsula of utmost metal affection. Whatever the reason for the shift to a more metal side of the core, the results are superb across the record’s eleven songs.

Beauty and the Breakdown begins on “House of Straw” with background shouting before merging into the hard throwdown riffs and beats that will follow through the rest of the record; which establishes Bury Your Dead as torchbearers to Hatebreed. One of the nice twists on “House of Straw” are the Snapcase-like guitars on the bridge, giving the song a stronger foundation. Bruso slams the line “take it back” into your throat as “A Glass Slipper” begins and soon verges into a non-ordinary sequence of segments illustrating the band’s talents. A compelling guitar riff/effect opens and rides the bottom of the terrific “The Poison Apple,” helping to add a slight melodic angle. The short “Twelfth Stroke of Midnight” is rather average tough guy by BYD standards, while “Trail of Crumbs” is also marginally forgettable. Looking for a way out and you come into contact with the machine gun guitars and super double-bass of “A Wishing Well” and “Let Down Your Hair.” The guitars, as both heavy chorus riff and more melodic chorus, lead the charge on “Mirror, Mirror…,” as the song devolves into a sort of odd electronic background breakdown before a final assault. Undertoned guitars begin “Second Star to the Right” while the chorus follows more old school hardcore shouting than a majority of the record’s tough guy presence. After the short instrumental noise on “The Enchanted Rose,” Beauty and the Breakdown ends on “House of Brick” and follows BYD’s m.o. but falls short of providing a final fireworks extravaganza.

Beauty and the Breakdown is certainly frontloaded with stand out tracks, but the rest of the record holds promise for your ears. More importantly, you can easily trace out a musical progression in Bury Your Dead; and a progression that you don’t regret. One fully expects Victory to use one of the songs on Beauty and the Breakdown for the annual moshing/hardcore Santa videos.