Band:	Zao
Album:	The Fear Is What Keeps Us Here
Style:	Metalcore
Release date:	June 2006

01. Cancer Eater
02. Physician Heal Thyself
03. Everything You Love Will Soon Fly Away
04. It's Hard Not To Shake With A Gun In Your Mouth
05. Kingdom Of Thieves
06. Killing Time 'Til Its Time To Die
07. There Is No Such Thing As Paranoia
08. Purdy Young Blondes With Lobotomy Eyes
09. My Love, My Love (We've Come Back From The Dead)
10. American Sheets On The Deathbed
11. A Last Time For Everything

Along with the likes of Converge, Rorschach, Starkweather and Earth Crisis, Zao have been a major influence on what Killswitch Engage, Heaven Shall Burn, Unearth (and countless others) are doing now and they deserve to be respected for this. Still, for all their influence, Zao always seemed to be a second-tier sort of band for me, never willing to take their music to a logical extreme and instead more often than not opting to play it safe. The Fear Is What Keeps Us Here doesn't change my mind.

The metalcore scene is vastly overpopulated already, the worst thing a band can do is to avoid evolution. Zao is simply not able to achieve the echelons of creativity that Converge or The Dillinger Escape Plan currently display. Even the band's raison d'etre, their strong Christian beliefs, is downplayed here. This leaves the music faceless and easy to dismiss as part of a crowd. The Fear Is What Keeps Us Here is a safe sort of record, an attempt to fuse all of the band's core elements into a comfortable whole, without taking any chances.

With all this said, this album is still an example of good metalcore. Dynamic and varied, the album effectively keeps me from nodding off. Highlights include "It's Hard Not To Shake With A Gun In Your Mouth" with its almost shoegaze white-noise melodic approach and the neo-grindcore attack of "American Sheets On The Deathbed". Nevertheless, as concise, hard hitting, aptly performed, memorable and heavy as this album is, the music here isn't in the end able to make me want to come back to it ever again after finishing this review. You might blame it on the oversaturation of the genre but for me, Zao's latest fails to make a lasting impression.