Joshua Fit For Battle are a strange little outfit. They’ve had a multitude of splits over their rather short career (effectively only making music for three years), but only ever put out one work that was really their own;
To Bring Our Own End. It’s in fact very reminiscent of what one of its members would later defect to, Hot Cross, combined with what that member previously recorded with, Neil Perry. Thus, it mixes a healthy dose of screamo, grind, and pop to make a rather exciting record, if just not nearly enough.
The most readily noticeable facet of the music is the overwhelming chaos.
Oppurtunist blasts in with no warning, guns-a-screaming and instruments-a-blazin’. Often, there’s no clear cut pattern as to what JFFB is doing, and often there really is no pattern to speak of in any sense. Song’s constantly bob and weave in and out of different schemes, and often the songwriting ends up taking a back seat to the insanity of the musicianship.
The most hippity-hoppity aspect of it is how the guitarists interweave all their parts into a greater whole. On
To Bring Our Own End, the opening guitar harmony is one of the most beautiful moments on the album, and the ease with which JFFB transform them into a shredfest is too…well, simple and easy to describe in words. However, you can’t take away from what drummer Kevin, who is one of the most creative drummers I’ve heard in quite a while. While his regular drum rhythms are fairly solid, it’s the numerous fills he contributes throughout the album that really sort of create many of those “magic” moments on the album. The opening fill to
Twelve Years of Catholic School And This is What I Learned is absolutely astounding, and the almost tribal sounding beat in
Dreams is astounding.
Then there’s Larry, the vocalist. To be blunt, the mix isn’t kind to him at all. He’s very harsh, and it may be better that he gets pushed behind nearly everything else, but you also rarely get to enjoy the parts where he does shine.
This Is Me Getting Stronger, while the most sweepingly stunning songs on the album, is only made so by his haunting vocals. His screaming is another story, as its generally grating and initially intelligible. They’ll grow on you, sure, and songs like
Oh Good Its One of Those Reality Shows are delivered so passionately, you can’t help but identify with the subject matter.
One area where JFFB shine is their lyrical work. Instead of going poetic or prose-y with it, they instead opt to be perfectly blunt. They ditch cliché references, silly phrasings, and just say precisely what they mean without any stupid nonsense covering it up.
Fuck the Men In Her Life[/i], essentially an ode to emotionally destroyed women in the world, is so brutally honest that it makes a deep impact on you, despite the fact it really says very little.
Contents of an American History Class is a heated exchange about how America’s history being taught the children is, in essence, a bad idea, as it will only continue the cycle of violence. Whatever, I trust Larry to be telling me the truth at this point. The most currently poignant song, however, is
Twelve Years of Catholic School And This is What I learned, a song de-humanizing priests for dismissing gay marriage, citing the fact that the writings that forbid it were written 2000 years ago by straight white males.
The force with which the lyrics are expressed, along with the intensity of the music, is what makes JFFB so great. Everything sounds impassioned and important when spit out through th sound machine that
To Bring Our Own End ends up becoming. It can’t hold up for it’s ~27 minutes duration (there is around 12 minutes of blankness on
Contents of An American History Class), and in the end it leaves you yearning for more, but as a whole it succeeds on nearly every level. It’s emotional, catchy, and kicks unhealthy amounts of a
ss. Just be sure not to play it while your reggaeton-obsessed friend walks in, or else a conversation on suicide will soon follow. Oh, how I wish the tears would go away.
Song's you should do Battle with har har
Oppurtunist
This is Me Getting Stronger
Fu
ck the Men In Her Life
Sleepwalkers Guide
