Walls of Jericho have been around for a while now. Cutting their teeth on the late 90s hardcore scene in Detroit, the band has been putting out an album every couple of years or so and The American Dream is the bands fourth full length. While the first album may have been straight up hardcore albeit of the Hatebreed kind, over time the band started to incorporate heavy metal elements into their sound and by 2006s With Devils Amongst Us All the band had become yet another hardcore band with metal influences.

The music is pretty predictable on The American Dream. What we have here is your basic hardcore riffing mixed up with plenty of breakdowns and stop start chugga-chug-chug riffing styles with the occasional Slayerized thrash riff. The problem with Walls of Jericho has always been that they are a one dimensional band. Much like Hatebreed, the band is on automatic pilot through the album and with a dozen songs to get through, it’s not a particularly entertaining ride. Candace Kusculain’s vocals continue to be the highlight for me and she has a very powerful growl. However, the music is at best pedestrian.

There is almost no variation on this album. Now, that works for some bands. Pro-Pain is a prime example of a band working in a similar musical style who manage to release memorable albums with some great catchy songs that stick in your head. However, The American Dream just gets boring very quickly.

To give credit to the band, they do try and change things up on album closer The Slaughter Begins but the inclusion of melody and clean melodic vocals and radio friendly ballad like feel just sounds like a calculated move. Plus, they did the same thing on their last album with the modern rock AOR sounding No Saving Me.

At the end of the day, the album suffers from some lazy songwriting and the band is on repeat mode right through these dozen songs.



Label - Trustkill
Year of Release - 2008