Album Review: Venues - Solace

I'm a little bit surprised by the way certain things unfold. I remember the metalcore movement beginning when I was younger, and I spent a chunk of my college time listening to "The End Of Heartache". What amazes me is we're getting twenty years on from the start of that wave, and various forms of metalcore are still not only around, but are thriving. I see countless records tagged as metalcore still, and I often wonder what about that genre allowed it to persist beyond being the fad we thought it was going to be.

That leads us to Venues, a band in the latest evolutionary step of metalcore. There has been a growth of bands either mixing metalcore with emo or post-hardcore, mixing male and female shouting and singing, or a combination of all of it. New wrinkles are still being found.

With new clean singer Lena joining to balance the shouted screams of Robin, the clean/harsh dynamic is accentuated with the male/female one, which takes us down a new road where modern metal and metalcore meet the beauty-and-the-beast metal of the more symphonic world. Venues has the feeling of being an alternate reality, modern rock version of the music Epica has perfected. But rather than using operatic and classical music as the axis to forge their metal around, Venues uses radio rock. It makes their music more powerful, and I would also say more relatable.

Venues also picks up on the thread that has been tying quite a few albums together in recent years, with these songs being the therapeutic way they have managed their emotions during tumultuous years. As the title suggests, this album is riding the crest of the wave back to shore, rather than drowning with their hand outstretched for what they cannot reach. Even though the music is heavy and aggressive, Lena especially gives the songs an optimistic tone that is defiant in the face of issues, and soothes the healing wounds.

From "Rite Of Passage" to "Uncaged Birds" to "Shifting Colors", the band alternates deeply heavy modern riffing with sharp clean choruses that accentuate each other. Both sides of the coin shine brighter because of the other, with the dynamics at play giving us a wider scope to view. While some bands wind up sounding small, because their power is focused so narrowly it can only be seen from one perspective, Venues is multi-faceted, and you can pick up on new angles and details every time you listen to the record. To that end, their music is more fitting of the human condition than the more aggressive bands who have not mastered the art of balance.

"Solace" is the type of album that we need more of. It is a vehicle we can scream out our frustrations with, but there is s sense of songcraft that elevates it above metal for the sake of metal. I started this review talking about metalcore, and I'll end there as well. What made albums like "The End Of Heartache" special was that they were able to take angst and anger, but package them in emotional songs that wrung out the worst parts of us. They drained us to put us back in touch with our better angels. That's the spirit Venues is tapping into with "Solace", and I'm sure the generation they are representing will feel the same way about Venues and this album as I do the glory days of Killswitch Engage. That's pretty darn good.