Band:	Knocked Loose
Album:	A Different Shade Of Blue
Style:	Hardcore, Metalcore
Release date:	August 2019

01. Belleville
02. Trapped In The Grasp Of A Memory
03. Serpent's Touch [feat. Emma Bolster]
04. By The Grave
05. In The Walls
06. Guided By The Moon
07. Mistakes Like Fractures
08. Forget Your Name [feat. Keith Buckley]
09. Road 23
10. ...And Still I Wander South
11. Denied By Fate
12. Misguided Son

That is the jazziest metalcore cover art I've ever seen. But it's not jazzy. It's breakdown after breakdown after breakdown.

And that's cool, to their credit they do come up with some really sick breakdowns, but there's only so much a man can take. I mean, I can take quite a few more, but I can't say that after a point any new breakdown really leaves a lot of impact and doesn't raise the adrenaline even more than it already did. But maybe I need to see this live to really appreciate it (hint: I wish), because if there's anything that Knocked Loose does really well and why their debut, 2016's Laugh Tracks, got so much attention, it's because of how uncompromisingly vicious their take on the metalcore of old is.

And by that I mean less the melodic metalcore one may think when they hear about the metalcore of old, but think about 5 years earlier. There isn't really much in terms of clean vocals here, and even when those do come up, they're less of the catchy melodic chorus ones, but rather the sinister chant-like thing. The bits and pieces of melody that do come up on A Different Shade Of Blue are drowned by chug after chug and breakdown after breakdown. Knocked Loose do not play around. Having listened to my fair share of breakdown-core, I can tell that a lot of bands like to do it ad nauseam, but it takes a really rabid band to keep up the act together for so long. It does get a bit saturated after a while, but by the time I noticed, I was way into the album already, so what's a few more, especially when they're so vicious.

At this point, Knocked Loose have proved that they can stick to their guns and deliver something slightly above meat and potatoes metalcore, but their saving grace is how good those meat and potatoes are. They do show a bit on this album that they do want to play with the formula a bit, whether with some buzzsaw death metal guitar tones, bits of sinister atmospheres, some melodic moments, a bit of beatdown hardcore and so on. The spirit is there, but these tweaks to their sound are still massively overshadowed. Hopefully that won't be the case for future albums as well, because I'm sure they have it in them to bring the sound forward a bit more without losing what made it so vicious and engaging in the first place. But if they still stick to their guns, I don't mind some more by-the-books metalcore if they keep up to the standard they've set.

So, while there are some clear innovations and skill honing here, it still isn't enough of an improvement over Laugh Tracks to consolidate Knocked Loose as top notch, but they've done just enough that they're worth keeping an eye on.