Escape The Fate – This War Is Ours – Album Review

This CD is an extremely important one for those of you that pay attention to Escape the Fate, or even Bless the Fall for that matter. This is what happens when the lead singer of one of the 2 greatest bands to walk the Earth leaves that band, and replaces the lead singer of the OTHER greatest band ever due to some problems with the law. I’m talking about when Craig Mabbitt left Bless The Fall, and replaced Ronnie Radke in Escape the Fate. Produced by John Feldmann (The Used, Story of The Year) and released through Epitaph Records. Many people have been waiting to see whether Escape the Fate changed their style of music to suite Craig’s more hardcore history, or if they kept true to their roots. Well, the answer is a bit of both and a bit weird.

When you start up the CD your treated to something that’s not really like either band. You can obviously tell that it’s Craig singing because of his unique voice, but when you put everything together (drums, guitars, singing…) it feels like it has an old school rock style to it, which isn’t bad. Songs like Ten Miles Wide, and We Won’t Back Down come to mind. It kind of reminded me of something like The Trooper, by Iron Maiden, but that passes after the first few songs and the style starts to slide towards an old Escape the Fate sound that everyones been missing. Some of these songs just gave me cold shivers because they sounded so cool. They had a great balance of vocals/guitar/ and drums, not overpowering any of them too much, with an unexpected, yet awesome, breakdown thrown in every once and a while (You Are So Beautiful is a great example of everything I just said). You won’t be finding yourself skipping any of these songs to get past the bad ones because they’re pretty much all good, maybe with the exception of It’s Just Me (it sounds like something you might hear playing in a diner during an old black and white detective movie). That doesn’t mean you won’t skip ahead to hear something that’s better than good. GREAT even. Yes. Great I say. From the beginning of This War Is Ours (The Guillotine Part II) you can tell it is going to be the most epic song on the whole CD. This song alone is reason enough to go out and buy this album. When it starts you think, “Oh, another slow starting song. How sad,” because you only hear a church choir making “oooOOO” noises, but then Omar breaks out one of the sickest solos I’ve heard since back in the day when I listened to A7X. Then out comes Craig’s amazing screaming talents, which can pretty much only be heard in this song. I could easily listen to the first 20 seconds of this song over and over and over and be happy that I spent 15 bucks on a CD. I won’t finish describing this song because you need to hear the amount of awesomness for yourself to be able to truly understand what I’m saying.

All in all, YES this is a really good CD, worth your money, but if you’re looking to get more of the old Escape The Fate, you’re in for some hurt. When I first heard that Craig was going to be their singer I imagined Escape The Fate and Bless The Fall running really fast into eachother and merging, creating a super band, but that’s not the case. They have a different style than both bands, a style somewhat their own. It’s great stuff, deffinitley recommend it.