Strictly all-meat-no-filler metalcore, the second album by Australian outfit
Parkway Drive
is the sort of solidly efficient album that keeps terms like "solidly efficient" from sounding like faint praise. The five-piece led by singer
Winston McCall
, along with producer
Adam Dutkiewicz
(who between his ongoing tenure in
Killswitch Engage
and his side career as one of metalcore's most in-demand producers is turning into the style's equivalent of high-profile indie producer
Chris Walla
), keep the songs stripped down to bare essentials, right down to the largely under three-minute song lengths. Similarly,
McCall
's vocals avoid the more comical extremes of the traditional metalcore bark while maintaining a suitably aggressive presence, while the band's lockstep rhythm section (bassist
Jia O'Connor
and drummer
Ben Gordon
) and unison-riff specialist guitarists
Jeff Ling
and
Luke Kilpatrick
fire off each track with enough energy to compensate for the general sameness of approach. As a result,
Horizons
is strictly by the book metalcore, but delivered with enough talent and passion to put across a set of songs that might easily come off as samey and dull in less capable hands. ~ Stewart Mason