Music Reviews category interest

New York punk band I Am The Avalanche is back after six years with a spit and vinegar filled vengeance. The band's new album, DIVE, Out November 20th on I Surrender Records, is its most poignant and abrasive, yet somehow melodically pleasing offering to date. DIVE is loaded with massive guitars and even bigger sounding BGVs in the form of gang-vocal style whoa-oa-oas that literally send chills up the spine so fast the listeners hair will stand on end with no help from aerosols or gels. 

I Am The Avalanche are one of those bands that I always felt never quite got the fair shake they deserved due to being constantly lumped in with emo darlings like Saves The Day, The Starting Line andamp; The Early November (with whom they released a split EP about 15 years ago, check it out here). Maybe it was the name which conjures up any number of statement based monikers from the late 90s andamp; early aughts (hello Texas Is The Reason, As Blood Runs Black, Bring Me The Horizon, We Came As Romans et. al) causing people to assume IATA was yet another emo, screamo or metal-core band vying for attention in an extremely crowded field (sorry Texas Is The Reason you probably didn't belong in that list). Maybe it was the bands they toured with, I don't honestly know. All I know is that if fans of bands like Dropkick Murphys, Hot Water Music or hell, any of the Fat Wreck crew had been made aware of IATA's music in those days things may have gone very differently for these guys who deserved to be so much bigger than they ever were. 

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There is so much to love on this album as a whole that I won't pick it apart song for song, as it really stands, unlike so many releases these days, on its own as a full album, and not just a collection of singles. It's one of those that must be listened to end-to-end and back again to be truly appreciated. It's a slab of smartcore layered with a whole mess of fight-song swillery released just in time for the fucking revolution. 

Songs from I Am The Avalanche's 2014 album "Wolverines" spent several years jumping around numerous personal playlists of mine and I gotta be honest here, I was giddy as a child on Christmas morning when I found out DIVE was about to land in my inbox for review. It's an album that you need to listen to either with headphones or in a car as your computer speakers will never do it justice, though if you're driving, be careful as you may find yourself pumping your fist through your moonroof on a few tracks. 

It's an album that apparently came with its share of struggles and it shows in the finished product. Recording sessions for DIVE wrapped March 15, 2020, the weekend much of America first came to terms with the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic and took shelter indoors. After some last-call lyrical additions (notably the title track’s resounding salvo, “We suffer together / no one’s alone”) Caruana fled North Jersey’s Barber Shop Studios to quarantine with his wife Laura in Brooklyn. Nevertheless, they were quickly hit with awful news. “We both got sick with coronavirus and quarantined together,” Caruana says. “Having her with me was a huge part of why this year wasn’t as dark as it could have been.” 
 
Caruana acknowledges the good fortune of their eventual recoveries after a couple bedridden weeks, along with the fact most of DIVE’s most dire lyrics were penned prior to the lockdown. “This has been coming,” he insists. “Pre-pandemic, things were still shitty. Our country has been turned upside-down by the current administration. So the songs that sound like they were written yesterday... I don’t think that’s going to change.” 

While most of the tracks, as noted, were penned prior to the nationwide lockdown and unrelated protests that followed (RIP George Floyd and too many others to name here), it comes as the perfect anthem for life in today's America, even though the tracks aren't political at all. Sometimes it takes a little gasoline to ignite a fire and DIVE is one of those albums that could stand alone as the soundtrack to taking a shit year by the horns, shoving a molotov cocktail down its throat and lighting the fuze. Enjoy.