Suffer No Fools "We Die As We Live" <REVIEW>
“…we’re graced with some pounding heavy metal with infectious chorus’ and huge sounding production.”
That’s the kind of abomination I would expect out of the SCP foundation, not metal reviews, yet here we are. This week we got a request from Alex Bain who wrote: Hey Tom, been watching the channel for a while now, been watching each and every video you’ve been putting out and finding out about some dope new bands that weren’t on my radar. I’m in a small unsigned metal band called Suffer No Fools, we are putting out an album on the 17th of April. I’ve attached a link below to check it out and possibly review. Cheers dude, keep up the good work!”
Suffer No Fools is a 4-piece metal band from the UK. They’ve been around for a few years having put out their debut album Songs for the Restless Youth back in 2018 and garnering a loyal fanbase in Britain. Now the album that bassist Alex Bain requested was their sophomore album We Die As We Live, which is being release April 17th. Now much like all my reviews, my thoughts are my own and are based on my opinions of music. On top of that, any and all requests for reviews are for honest reviews. TL;DR, if you requested an album, you basically forfeit the right to get pissy with me for not liking it. You asked for a review, I’m going to give one. With that in mind, let’s not waste much more time… let’s get straight into it.
Before even getting into the album, you notice that this album has a slight theme to it. Possibly not intentional, but with songs early on like “Cocytus” and “Egypt”, adding to that being the album cover, you get the feeling this might be slightly exotic. Not erotic, though I can understand the confusion, what with that face in the thumbnail. Actually starting the album, we get more or less what I was expecting with the opening intro track of “Cocytus”. That song swells into “Egypt”, which I’m guessing was named after listening to only the first 20 seconds of the song, arguably the best way to name anything. That song explodes into existence with the guitar work of Jamie Newdeck and Ali Khan and the thunderous bass of Alex Bain. From there the song kicks into full gear with the driving force of Mike Taylor’s grooves and shear heavy metal riffs. This is also where we get a good sense of who Ali is as a vocalist. At first I was shocked to hear that James Hetfield was out of rehab so early, but then I realized; “no, that’s just their vocalist”. From the bands attempt at scoring for the next Uncharted game, we get into “Wicked Temptations”, which is so easy to mistake for a metalcore song, but once the vocals kick in, the confusion continues. Not in a bad way, just pointing out the line between metalcore and heavy metal is blurry with this one. “Nothing To Fear” continues the trend we saw in Egypt, with the exotic vibe continuing to paint a picture of a middle eastern desert. To be quite frank with you, “Nothing To Fear” is possibly my favourite song off We Live As We Die, and it’s thanks to Ali Khan’s vocal performance in the chorus. The melodies are so infectious, you’d think it was the coronavirus. No really, his vocal performance on this song is what helped the song get stuck in my head. I’ve caught myself singing the lyrics “Still the same blame, untaimed. Open my eyes, faces unnamed“ in passing and never even notice that it just sprung up.
Continuing past that song, the rest of the album is more or less straight forward. “Survive” is very clearly inspired by old school Judas Priest and “Six Feet Deep” treads different waters but is more or less a similar song to what we’ve heard earlier in the album, although the chorus doesn’t have that same flare and epicness from before and instead sounds like Ali got drunk off of epic after that and was too tired to continue. “Broken World“ and “Liar” continue this trend and I began to lose steam at this point. These songs aren’t bad, but it’s clear that Suffer No Fools didn’t have a lot of awesome songs for the album, so they needed to write some songs to fill the gaps. “I Am Reality” closes the album out on a high note, not as good as where we started but there was clearly something to the song that must have clicked with me.
Finishing the album, it became clear that this was an album that was genuinely great, if not slightly lopsided. The first half of We Die As We Live soars with bombast percussion and infectious lyrics and melodies, while the second half was the result of not wanting to make an EP. To be brutally honest, if this was an EP of the first four tracks, I wouldn’t have too much of an issue, if anything it would push this album forward to being the front runner for best EP in my book. But for a full album, mixing up the tracklisting a bit to give variety would’ve probably done the album more justice. Of course, it’s just my opinion and I can’t speak for you personally, but for me, randomizing some of the placements of the tracks would’ve really kept me on my toes instead of falling off on the latter half because I lost balance from fatigue.
Overall, I was really impressed with We Die As We Live. An album with an obvious leaning towards heavy metal in the vein of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, but making the sound uniquely their own with some of the metalcore influences thrown in. From front to back, we’re graced with some pounding heavy metal with infectious chorus’ and huge sounding production. The album is slightly misbalanced as most of the good stuff is pushed to earlier in the record, but even the not-so-great stuff later on is still worth checking out. It’s an album that allows for so much fun and power mixed into one consecutively awesome record. Suffer No Fools brought it this time out. It’s hard to say if this is better than their debut, but they are still going strong and I feel like this trend will continue for years to come.
13/15
… because on the private stream of the album, most of the listeners stopped after the first track! Ugh! So rude!
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