After five albums Project 86 remain a conundrum - they are unapologetic about their faith but they should occasionally apologise for their music. On this occasion they should raise their heads just a little.
Project 86 have always toyed dangerously with concepts of faith in alien worlds, sometimes it has worked very, very well, as in their best album Truthless Heroes but, the but is significant, they don't always know good from bad.
Here they snap down lock and load style and stun your ears but not often enough and too often coming off sounding like a poor man's Static X. Andrew Schwab has a sufficient roar but he is always better crooning - using his voice rather than slapping it about. Check the layered to the point of atmosphere title track against the mediocre rumble rock of Subject to Change, which comes across as Korn desperately imitating The Cure.
It's a good thing then that they use silence to fill the melody throughout ... And The Rest Will Follow.
The Hand, The Furnace, The Straight Face is second only to the opening cut Sincerely, Ichabod, in terms of metal brutality but a smooth rock riff and a swaggeringly heavy chorus underpin it. The problem in critiquing Project 86 is their seriousness - it's impossible to deny their intent and I'd always back them in a judgement day debate. Making a joke of them seems too easy but they have occasionally done it for us with lyrics like "your journals in crimson/her veins filled with red ink/your quill spills in crimson". Schwab has always worn a second mask as a philosopher and academic, shrouding his songs in Orwellian nightmares and it seems he too believes the future is a boot stomping on all of us.
2/4
Other coverage for this album
The Phantom Tollbooth 2005Reviewed by Joel RoddinBack in familiar territory with Tooth & Nail Records, Project 86's fifth album seems to balance its time between settling into an established feel and poking into some new directions. The disc's overall sound seems to blend traces of its two predecessors, Songs to Burn Your Bridges By, and Truthless Heroes, being slightly reminiscent of both, yet fairly unique in some sort of unexplainable,…The Phantom Tollbooth 2005Reviewed by Jonathan AvantsProject 86 has become a well-oiled machine; with the release of ...And the Rest Will Follow, they've pumped out their slickest, most consistent material to date. The new songs lean slightly towards the melodic, but the alternative/hard-rock sound the band has touted over the past few releases is not sacrificed. The songs are still epic, head-pounding, and wrenchingly brutal musically and…The Phantom Tollbooth 2005Reviewed by Bert GanglGiven the varied nature of the band's back catalog, it is hardly surprising that debate currently runs rampant over which Project 86 record constitutes the Orange County foursome's defining work. The self-titled debut and sophomore outing, Drawing Black Lines, were of a piece with the energetic, rap-metal workouts of artists like P.O.D. and Rage Against the Machine. The group followed with…Similar sounding releases
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2002P.O.D.Satellite
