Underoath Create Their Masterpeice

Underoath create their masterpeice
Matt Winters

"You are the desperate, we are the savior."

This is the statement screamed in the middle of "Breathing in a New Mentality," the first song on Underoath's latest effort "Lost In The Sounds Of Separation."

The album is a hulking mass of radiant leads, screams that sound lost, dissonant, and cathartic all at once. There are no pop leads, there is no fat. These men are here to show you their souls in all their pain and anguish.

Gone from this album are the sing/scream dynamics that guided their previous efforts. Once in a while, drummer/singer Aaron Gillespie steps in and sings a few notes, but they are there to make the piece more haunting and lost. They are light-years ahead of their breakthrough effort, 2004's "They're Only Chasing Safety," which was hailed as a triumph.

Underoath are ahead of even their last stellar effort, 2006's Define The Great Line, and they know it. Lead singer Spencer Chamberlain growls "And so the plot thickens," on the track "Anyone Can Dig A Hole, But It Takes A Real Man To Live In It."

The music is darker than anything they have done in the past, but it bends gently to almost a sort of resolution. In the second half of the album we see a slowing down of the music, an effect that imbues the record with a sense of redemption.

The last track on the album, "Desolate Earth/The End Is Here," we are given something as beautiful and haunting as any band has produced, a mostly instrumental track that leads into Spencer Chamberlain singing "I found hope, I found God / I found the dreams of the believers," over static. This album is for the desperate and at the end, if you pay attention, you might become a believer.

Orginally Published in The WSU Signpost 9/19/08