Album Review: Architects - The Here And Now

Four albums in and Brighton's Architects latest record, 'The Here and Now' is one that sees the band become more defined and well-rounded. From the fiery opening metal riffs of 'Day In Day Out', the Brighton group sound thoroughly confident and ease listeners in with a familiar style and delivery; thumping drums, driving guitars and aggressive vocals. Whereas tracks like 'Learn To Live' and 'BTN' sees the bands more melodic, more approachable sound come into play

One of the albums highlights comes in the form of 'An Open Letter To Myself'; an airy build up that allows Sam Carter's ever-improving vocals to be given the space needed to showcase his talent, whilst the slow-burning structure is excellently pulled off.

Throughout the bands song structure becomes highlighted more and more, each song seems to have been more carefully thoughtout and combined with the bands musical technique also progressing; 'The Blues' combines the crunching riffs with Carter's strong voice to create an almighty sound that is rather amazing.

'Stay Young Forever' (featuring vocals from Comeback Kid's Andrew Neufeld) is a scrappy, riff-filled number that adds to the albums diversity with the ballad-esque 'Heartburn' being at the other end of the albums variation; a slower tempo with an anthemic vibe.

Collectively 'The Here And Now' is impressive and one of the first great albums of 2011, although some songs (for example 'Delete, Rewind') on their own lose their impact, and to an extent don't sound anything different to what we've had before. Nevertheless 'The Here And Now' is a powerful record with many favourable moments and its clear that the bands development is certainly going in the right direction, and its highly inevitable that the bands popularity will to grow, as this is a record that will certainly win over new fans, but may also lose some.

3.5/5

'The Here and Now' by Architects is released on January 24th on Century Media.

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Architects on MySpace, Twitter and Facebook.

Sean Reid