In The Arms of Providence

Location:
PORTLAND, MAINE, US
Type:
Artist / Band / Musician
Genre:
Screamo / Emo
Site(s):
Label:
Muscle City Records (www.musclecityrecords.com)
Type:
Indie
In The Arms of Providence is dead.go to In The Arms of Providence dot com to find out moreGet your copy of the NEW ep "Left My Voicebox In A Seaside Town" from any Bullmoose Music store for $4.97 or go here to order online.Tracklisting:1. The So-Called Secret I Made Up2. Ask Not 3. The Involuntary Vampire4. On the tip of the Sun and Fucked5. Fuck Transmission"The evolution of music is a beautiful thing. Just as metal moved to hardcore — guitars quicker and more methodical, vocals screamed and primal — so has hardcore now moved back toward the pop that created metal. Such is post-hardcore, a genre of music not far from emo that combines hardcore’s manic insanity of machine-gun guitars and throat-wrenching vocals with pop’s melodies and winsome singing. It makes hardcore’s sound a hell of a lot more accessible to the common listener and In the Arms of Providence put it on display nicely for their debut EP, Left My Voicebox in a Seaside Town (which is a great title, by the by), the first release off of Muscle City Records, the product arm of Portland’s most-active all-ages promoters.



Following in the footsteps of bands like Taking Back Sunday and Thursday (not sure why day names are popular in the genre), ITAOP do well to revel in the newish genre’s flexibility and trade on the talents of lead vocalist Chris Moulton, who is equally comfortable singing a careless whisper as screaming his last scream.



In "Involuntary Vampire" — containing the lovable lyric, "worth your weight in Camel cigarettes" — Moulton wins mostly with that nasally back of the throat sound that Sting perfected early in his career. There is a lot of Police sound here, actually, but things get much heavier than the Police ever dared when the song launches into its more hardcore elements. Micah Davis’s bass is active and interesting, and the guitars can be quite melodic at times.



Those duties are handled ably by Nate Johnson and Mike Caminiti, who proved he knew a great melodic guitar hook with his work in Even All Out. I haven’t seen Providence live yet, but it must be tough work switching back and forth between the straight-ahead and fast-paced crunch and the textured single-string picking that defines most of these songs. Much responsibility falls on drummer Dan Capaldi, who’s got a good feel for the ride cymbal and for when he should mostly stay out of the way.



Like on "Ask Not," which, after a bunch of the screaming and yelling, enters into a great ethereal, jazzy soundscape, with plaintive vocals coming from "a fish like me" getting more and less aggressive, Moulton lovingly embracing words by extending them out and getting the feel of them in his mouth. They’re maybe a little too back in the mix, though, as it’s hard to make them out, and it’s a disconcerting coincidence that the band note that "a 50-foot wall of water could never fuck up your day" — there’s no way they could have recorded this after the tsunamis hit.



There’s also a nice repeated bit where "we made pirate ships of my bed," but then comes the screaming, which is just impossible for me to make out. Sonically, it doesn’t much bother me, but it does seems as though these screamed bits are often the point of the song, and without a lyric sheet sometimes I feel like I’m missing the point. I don’t have the final packaging, though, so it’s possible lyrics are included, which I think is a must if you’re treading in this genre.



One place where I do get the point might be "On the Tip of the Sun," which is almost a pure pop song at times, a little bit Men at Work even, before it traipses into the heartwarming "if you told me to [spoken], I’d slash my face [frighteningly screamed]." Or maybe it’s "smash my face" — the sentiment’s the same. What lyrical content I can pick up throughout the record is alternately life-affirming and self-deprecatory, which makes sense for a bunch of young guys just starting to figure things out. As a band, they’ve figured out plenty. The songs are interestingly organized and well delivered, and they give their listeners something they can both understand and learn from. " - Sam Pfeifle. portland phoenix



In The Arms of Providence has played with: Odd Project, The Classic Struggle, Hawthorne Heights, Scatter The Ashes, Outsmarting Simon, The Receiving End of Sirens, Bayside, Number One Fan, The Break, Mercury Switch, Eyes Like Knives, Read Yellow, Avoid One Thing, Misery Index, Cannae, As Tall As Lions



Releases: 2004 s/t 4 song EP - Independently Released2005 5 song EP, "Left My Voicebox in a Seaside Town" - OUT NOW on Muscle City Records
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