Like Moths to Flames

Dark Divine (Rise Records)
By Mike Delano

Metalcore stalwarts Like Moths to Flames make a huge step forward on Dark Divine, their fourth record. Like their former labelmates and fellow Ohioans My Ticket Home, they’ve pushed beyond the boundaries of meat-and-potatoes metalcore and evolved their sound to great results. There’s still plenty of red-faced aggression and pit-churning breakdowns on this new record to keep the scene police happy, but it fits now as a natural part of the band’s sound rather than a straightjacket. Vocalist Chris Roetter is really set free here and comes up with some fantastic vocal melodies on the title track, the blistering “Shallow Truths for Shallow Minds” and the soaring “Nowhere Left to Sink.” Throughout the album he shows enough power and versatility to invite comparisons to Soilwork’s Björn “Speed” Strid, although the band doesn’t let his voice explore many slower tempos or non-traditional song structures like Soilwork has in recent years. In that way, Dark Divine, for all its ambition, is actually a pretty conservative record in terms of its pacing and overall variety, but it succeeds because everything it does, it does well. Now that the band has all but mastered this style of metalcore, it will be interesting to see if they can make a Deftones-style reach into other genres and pull forth some new influences to expand their sound even further.
(riserecords.com)