THE METAL WILL LIVE ON: RISE AGAINST ~ THE BLACK MARKET

It's here! Rise Against's latest album THE BLACK MARKET. I'm writing this as I'm listening to it and the feeling is good. 12 tracks. 46 minutes of awesome. I've listened to it 4 times already end to end. It's good. You should buy it.

A little context first: This is the first entirely new album from Rise Against since 2011's ENDGAME. Endgame was good. It had several solid tracks and some that have become favorites among their whole discography. All in all though it kinda left me wanting more. At some point during the album around the halfway point it loses me and the songs and sounds start to run together. Endgame is the only album of their's to do that for me. For me the greatest albums of Rise Against are The Sufferer and the Witness and Appeal to Reason. Those albums are pure badass gold! I gotta hand it to them, those two albums are really hard to beat. So with Endgame I kinda had a feeling Rise Against was on the downhill slide. I was wrong.

Rise Against is back, baby!!! This album rocks! It has a lot of those old familiar troupes we've all come to expect from the rock band, rapid pace guitar and heavy percussion, varying tempos and abrupt changes in rhythm, a signature of theirs made famous by the song Prayer for the Refugee. The balls to the wall screaming and thrashing track is there along with the tried and true acoustic ballad near the end.

Everything you love about Rise Against is here along with more. There are a lot of new sounds I've never heard from them before. The tracks vary and each song feels like something new. The problem I had with Endgame is nonexistent here. The album starts off with a bang and fires right on through one song after another. You can tell they're trying new things and many of their influences can be heard. Foo Fighters elements and 90's alternative rock are strongly felt but the band makes it their own. Tracks 1-4 are standout along with track 6. I gotta say that the album never really drops off at all. You'll find yourself rocking out to it all the way through. Bravo, guys! Welcome back!

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Overall Ranking 7 out of 10