This is one for metalcore/hardcore fans only, though it’s one of those frustrating albums where non-metalheads wish the band would stick to being melodic and avoid the screaming.

On the plus side, it’s a varied album, with sounds from brutal metal to heavy rock and into grungier stoner rock, with bands including Kyuss and Black Sabbath coming to mind, though mostly ETID sound like no-one else. It’s tightly played and sparse, despite the noise, and you feel they vet every note.

The opening of Fear And Trembling is jerky and hesitant but the song soon turns screamo, Keith Buckley giving it full bore to spit out the lyrics. Glitches is punkier but similar but then C++ (Love Will Get You Killed) is more melodic stoner while the QOTSA/Kyuss-like Two Summers is a palatable heavy rock tune, Buckley showing he’s got a good voice for melody. That’s about the album really, mainstream heavy rock mixed with the hardcore. Standout is the stoner It Remembers, when Buckley is joined by Brendon Urie of Panic! at the Disco.

Wikipedia informs us that Buckley is a former English teacher with a tattoo of Spock’s head on a lawn chair, day dreaming about what he (Spock) would look like with a moustache, which cerebral eccentricity sums up the album: he could do the melodic stuff he wanted to but he doesn’t. The lyrics are intelligent and range from angry rants to jokes (“Been in and out of wedlocks with an exoskeleton key” or “I’m joining a cult, cut off my hair, clean out my head, fill me with song”). Other lyrics are blacker, your standard troubled mainman fare.

Try It Remembers and the brutal Petal for the two extremes.

Every time I buy: