Taken - And They Slept (2001)“Screamo” is often used as a catch-all term by lazy listeners and music journalists for any music that utilizes screaming despite the fact that it’s a genre of its own, with distinct rules and hallmarks. It’s tricky to bring the term up in relation to metalcore since, for some reason, the two became erroneously synonymous at the turn of the century, and many are still wandering about under the impression that Atreyu, Orchid, and Underoath all belong to the same genre. It would be foolish to blame Taken, since they never achieved the level of popularity during their initial run as a band necessary to blur such lines, but someone somewhere stumbled on And They Slept and didn’t know what to make of its fusion of metalcore and screamo, which plays so naturally it transcends all three and defies easy categorization. Taken knew they were iconoclasts. They relished their idiosyncrasies, thrived on thwarting expectation without compromising their core sound, which eschews most of the traditional sources of the metal part of the genre--thrash, Gothenburg, etc.--for Pg. 99, Circle Takes the Square, and Thursday, while hooking the rest of their wagon to the hard-bitten sounds of Drowningman, Converge, and The Dillinger Escape Plan for their -core. Taken earned themselves that other common mislabel, “emo,” thanks to vocalist Ray Harkins’ Geoff Rickly-ish singing: the way he oscillates between screams and off-key clean phrases on “Never An Answer,” and the way he commits to the histrionics of “Same Story, Different Day” and “Overshadowing at 100 East,” make a case for Taken drawing just as much inspiration from post-hardcore as screamo and metalcore--and, as if this shepherd’s pie of influences wasn’t already overstuffed: “We put a part in every CD that we think is funny as hell that no one else will….The jazz part on [debut record Finding Solace in Dissention], it was funny to us, everyone else got pissed. I have a feeling it's going to be the same thing with the hand claps [on song “Overused History”] and I can't wait to hear it because that's what makes me laugh, when people get bent out of shape because we put hand claps on a CD, give me a freakin' break!” And They Slept has a lot going on, but even the hand-claps, jazz passages, and emo flourishes aren’t what make it a difficult listen. The record is slippery in a way uncommon to metalcore. It seems always to be squeezing out of one’s grasp, coalescing for a moment around a fidgety riff, a vocal pattern, or a spritz of melody before it disintegrates and reforms around another. In moments of harmony, it’s dense and frantic; in moments of disarray, it’s insular and introspective, even mournful. Despite its inability--or unwillingness--to settle on a mood, the album has atmosphere to spare, one that haunts long past the album’s half-hour running time and demands repeat listens, at first just to investigate whether there is some underlying structure and not just the illusion of one projected by the short songs and musical repetitions. More of their framework emerges the more one listens--rickety, melted, and unstable, but metalcore through-and-through. “The Most Feared Thing” brings it into sharp relief with its Busy Signal at the Suicide Hotline riffs and Harkins’s caustic screams. Later, Mike Minnick of Curl Up and Die pops up to lend his voice to “Coward For You,” testifying that And They Slept and Unfortunately, We’re Not Robots do, in fact, belong to the same family tree. And the band sear the point in with the nitroglycerine of “What’s Best Right Now,” a song that never seems sure when it’s going to blow. In contrast, “Beauty in Dead Flowers” establishes the band as more than a metalcore band: it doesn’t feel like a break from Taken’s drums-bass-guitar set-up so much as a surprise jerking-back of the curtain, revealing the band’s core of sentimentality, but not of saccharinity; a mistake many of their peers tend to make. Bonus trivia: the piano that dominates the song is played by Molly Street, who also performed for Bleeding Through on Portrait of the Goddess. Counterparts have cited Taken as a major influences, and Brendan Murphy, one of the biggest names in modern metalcore, has been vocal about his love for this “perfect band.” It’s not hard to hear the influence of Taken’s first record, Finding Solace in Dissension, in Counterpart’s heaviest moments, and the shadow of their final EP, Between Two Unseens, hanging over their more contemplative pieces; this is a band that have studied Taken through their phases, noted their successes, analyzed their (few and negligible) failures; and if you listen closely, you can hear how Counterparts have come to sound like a reimagining of the band Taken were, or a fantasy of what they could have become. Theirs would have been a fine legacy to leave behind with an innovative discography, including a masterpiece in And They Slept, to their name. But, in a fortuitous alignment of things, Taken have today released their first new music in fourteen years; the same day The American Metalcore Project looks back on And They Slept! The song, titled “Regret,” is nearly five minutes (4:39—it counts), and is the first single pulled from a forthcoming EP, With Regards To, due out in just over a month on April 27th. According to the blurb on Get Alternative, through which the song premiered, With Regards To will center on a personal tragedy: This song and entire EP are about my mental journey with my wife’s diagnosis of cancer. This song in particular is about that moment when I picked myself up off the ground to be a better version of myself for my wife and family. I could have let this news bury me and my wife, but after soul searching nights I gave that thought process up and moved forward. This is a universal truth that we all must face; when life hands you a situation you can’t fathom, what will you do? With as much sensitivity toward the matter as possible, I think we can safely expect this EP to present a maturation of the sound Taken pursued on And They Slept and Between Two Unseens with the same affecting sincerity as defines their back catalogue; the band is older than they were, no longer heartbroken young men but adults coming together to make music not for profit, but for the reasons I think we make music in the first place: to give form to intangible things like pain and hope so that we can grapple with them, understand them, absorb them, and move on. -Brian L.
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