Attack Attack! - Someday Came Suddenly

What do you get when you combine Metalcore, Autotune, and the Backstreet Boys? You get Attack Attack! More or less, this is what I was thinking while I was listening to this album, which can be found on YouTube, or on CD. I had listened to one or two of their tracks before, and never really thought about it before, but after a friend of mine recommended I should listen to Attack Attack!, I did. Let me just say my reaction was a mixture of awe, disappointment, and a minute feeling of awkwardness.

The albums opens up with Hot Grills and Hightops, a hip-hop intro that really feels out of place with the rest of the album. It then moves on to perhaps their most well-known song, Stick Stickly, which is a mixture of what some call "post-hardcore" and techno. In my opinion, this song is like Disney gone metal. More or less, the rest of the album follows the same formula: clean vocals, scream vocals, autotunes robotic voice of the lead singer, and then some techno, then more screaming and clean vocals. Add in more than a fair share of guitar riffs and breakdowns, and you pretty much have this album in a nutshell. The lyrics are rather dry, unoriginal, and quite a pain to listen to. The album moves on, and closes out with Outro, a piano solo that lasts about a minute and a half.

What makes this album rather original is how Attack Attack! somewhat successfully manages to combine screaming with C# vocals to make a rather unique sound, but not one I would prefer to listen to. One thing that bothers me is that I can predict that other bands are going to use the same formula Attack Attack! has done to create a real mess. It just seems as though whatever genre you would put this record in (I refuse to call it metalcore or post-hardcore, because the only thing this album has that would classify it as those are screaming vocals and guitars), would really only fit a niche market of listeners.

I can't honestly find it in my heart to recommend their music to anyone, other than maybe to just hear it and make your own judgments (as I said earlier, pretty much every song on this album is available on YouTube). Other than that, it gets a 5.5 for being nothing short of generic, while not horribly disgracing the genre.

Lukario