THE BANNER - Frailty

The Banner - Frailty

12 songs
34:44 minutes
***** ***
Ferret

Bandpage

New Jersey metal band The Banner takes advantage of its ten years of history to deliver a truly sizzling third album. Frailty is hard to categorise from the beginning. The opener Hello F**kers has been played on a broken acoustic guitar, with the band adding drunken vocals in a great Tom Waits fashion, but from there on, we are definitely steeped in metal territories. The Banner may have started as a horror tinged metal / punk band, but they must have developed quite a lot to sound like they do today. Combining extreme metal with the energies of hardcore, it would be unfair to consider them a metalcore band. Instead you get alternatively high speed assaults delivered with a venomous rage and painfully distorted mid-tempo utterances of suffering. The many years of experience allow The Banner to switch from one genre to the next without noticeable breaks, making for a very smooth listening experience.

Don’t expect anything fun on Frailty. Only the punkish Ratflesh towards the end of the album makes for a more common experience, otherwise you’re in for some of the most demented psycho core metal that fans of Integrity and Today Is The Day should absolutely try. The powerful production emphasises the acoustic anguish of making it unharmed through this album. Rarely before can something ugly be so exciting!

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