Screamo On & On: Alexisonfire, 'Old Crows/Young Cardinals'

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ALEXISONFIRE CO-SINGER GEORGE Pettit wants to kill screamo. Too bad his band's latest album, "Old Crows/Young Cardinals," merely reaffirms the genre instead of striking it dead.

The Canadian band has crafted a strong following with a post-hardcore, punk-tinged sound first heard on its self-titled 2002 debut. The group's 2004 CD, "Watch Out!," is Alexisonfire's most balanced, complete work — and it went platinum in the Great White North — while 2006's "Crisis" also hit the one-million-sold mark.

But what was once an explosive mix of hypnotically melodic vocals from co-singer Dallas Green and frenzied, fist-pumping screams from the spastic Pettit has now become a formulaic, repetitive juxtaposition that relies on ugly churning guitars and uninspired lyrics to get its point across.

The 11 tracks on "Old Crows/Young Cardinals" blur together, and though the album's lyrics deal with the band's evolution and tempering feelings of isolation and loss with a persistent determination for life, the songs end up one-dimensional.

Take, for example, the album's first two songs: "Old Crows," which describes the band looking back on its career and pondering the presence it has had in the scene, and "Young Cardinals," which suggests they want to keep on fighting, creating music and making their voices heard. But the songs, which could have interestingly contrasted with each other to demonstrate the band's dueling sides, merely sound ... pretty much exactly the same.

"Old Crows" is 4 minutes and 19 seconds of Pettit's shrieks and yells as he proclaims, "We are not the kids we used to be" and "Sometimes life just gets the best of us," while "Young Cardinals" starts off a lot like a Rancid song (the stuttered drums and Pettit's Tim Armstrong-esque shouting/rapping style) and then awkwardly transitions into a slower, more melodic demonstration of Green's vocal range, as he repeats "young cardinals" over and over again during the final minute of the song. That's about all Green contributes — the rest is Pettit trying far too hard to add hip-hop to his repertoire.

Yet if there had been more of Green's presence, maybe the song could have been a well-adjusted expression of the dichotomous nature of the group. Instead, it's all Pettit's show — and it stays that way for most of the album. Green's only purpose for the majority of the songs is to play back-up vocals to Pettit's screeching, a decision that makes the album a screamo-heavy, nu-metal-esque mess.

The only song Green really has to himself is the closer, "Burial," which is the album's slowest, dreariest track and gives him the opportunity to croon, moan and coo "oh winter" for a whole minute. But there is an upside — it's all singing; no yelps or shouts here.

So, if you're confused by Pettit's statement that he would be taking the band to "some new, weird territories" with "Old Crows/Young Cardinals," you should be — the promised ground-breaking stuff never comes.

Written by Express contributor Roxana Hadadi
Photo courtesy Blackout Music