Burden Of A Day - Blessed Be Our Ever After
Back in the late 00s, I didn’t have access to music the same way I do now. I didn’t have iTunes, Apple Music, or YouTube, but all I did have were physical copies. If I couldn’t find it in stores, I couldn’t get it, so there are a lot of albums I remember hearing about, but I never got, because I couldn’t find them. One of those albums was the second album from Sarasota, FL metalcore-turned-post-hardcore band Burden Of A Day. I had I only heard their last album, 2009’s Oneonethousand, and that’s still one of my favorite post-hardcore albums, but I knew it was their only album with their second vocalist. I love that album, but I knew they had another vocalist before that. Vocalist Kendall Knepp was on their first two albums, including the one I’ll be talking about today, 2008’s Blessed Be Our Ever After. This was their second album, and their first for Rise Records. I just talked about Here I Come Falling’s one and only album, 2008’s Oh Grave, Where Is Thy Victory, and how that album helped to bring “Risecore” to the scene, and you could argue that this album does, too. I never owned a copy of this one, but I found a copy at a 2nd & Charles that I visited recently.
I was ecstatic to find it, because I love finding albums in the metalcore, pop-punk, and alt-rock worlds out in the wild like that, but I didn’t know what to expect with it. I’ve given the album a couple of listens, and this is an interesting experiment of an album. This album is trying to be a few things at once, and while I like it, I don’t think it succeeds at any of it. Let me back up, though. Burden Of A Day tries a few different things here, whether it’s 00s metalcore or 00s pop-punk. Yeah, this album tries to be both heavy and catchy at the time, but it’s not done in the style of easycore that was gaining steam at the time. It’s just trying to be catchy and heavy all at once, but it doesn’t really work as well as it should. The vocals are still pretty good, but I don’t care for the cleans as much, despite that they’re fine for what they are.
It’s just that there aren’t really any hooks here, so the album doesn’t really do a lot for me at the end of it. I like it, but this is an interesting little time capsule, if anything at all. This album doesn’t really do anything that other bands didn’t do, and I liked their next album a lot more, but this one is still pretty solid. The metalcore side of their sound is what I like more, but this album is pretty good. At 38 minutes, it’s a short one, so its messiness isn’t too bad or overwhelming, but it’s not an album that I’m going back to all that much. I wish I was, but it’s a good album for what it is, and it’s worth the listen to hear something that came out around the time Risecore started popping off and getting popular. Their third and final album is better, but this one has some solid breakdowns and riffs that run throughout, albeit nothing all that special. I don’t know if you’ll get anything out of it if you’re not a huge metalcore fan, but if you really love the genre or you’re a historian for the genre in the 00s, I think this is worth a listen, regardless.
