Rise to Remain - City of Vultures

 The story of London based metalcore group, Rise to Remain is one that is phenomenal, inspiring and shows a sense of determination and patience, as the group rose to success the old fashioned hard way when a much easier solution is more practical. This, as it has been stated countless amount of times, that lead singer Austin Dickinson is the son of none other than Bruce of Iron Maiden. While Bruce could have easily produced their album and instantly sell the group out to the world of metal, allowing their cause of fame and popularity purely to derive from the fact that he's the father of the frontman, instead he allowed Austin to make his own journey through the world of the music industry, as he played in several other bands, played tiny venues and positioned the band in masses of support slots for bigger groups. But now, Rise to Remain have finally come to the forefront of modern metal, gaining mass amounts of popularity on Kerrang!, Scuzz even on Radio 1, all leading up the release of their debut, City of Vultures.
 And sadly, the album is really quite underwhelming. I mean, they're a talented bunch of guys. They can play some fine metalcore with much ferocity and brutality in nature of creating frantic breakdowns and relentlessly hardcore barrage of riffs, plus the tendancy for Austin to use his melodic vocals much more than his screaming shows that they aren't too reliant on regular metalcore techniques and that combined with some awesome widdly solos from Ben Tovey, paricularly on Power Through Fear, actually shows something of a Maiden influence which is pretty cool to hear, however it still fails to leave much of a lasting impact, and fails to hit listners as hard as it could. Really, at best the album makes Rise to Remain sound like a watered down As I Lay Dying.
 Which is actually another important point to make about this album. City of Vulures shows that many bands who released their debut albums in the 2000's have now reached a point where they can be seen as influencial, on listening to this album, one can hear various styles reminiscent of groups like As I Lay Dying, Bullet for my Valentine, Trivium, Funeral for a Friend, Lostprophets and even some early Bring Me the Horizon can be heard on one or two tracks. However, hearing this ultimately makes one think of these groups and pine for hearing them play the music better.
 City of Vultures, though shows a sense of talent and ability of the group, is simply lacking in a certain spark of uniqueness and speciality. However, a debut album can often be a difficult place for a band to start. Perhaps we'l hearing something from them on a later album that is truly amazing, until then we'll just have to wait.