The Five Hundred – A World On Fire
Release Date: 30th July 2021
Label: Long Branch Records
Pre-Order/Pre-Save
Genre: Metalcore
FFO: Ghost Iris, Hollow Front, Any Given Day, The Wise Man’s Fear, Orbit Culture.
Review By: Ryan Shearer
I feel like I’ve watched The Five Hundred grow up; not quite in the sense that I taught them to ride a bike or gave them the “the birds-and-the-bees talk”, but I’ve seen them flourish from a local metal band into a signed, successful & respected name on the UK scene. I took a look at their first EP back in 2015 (Winters) which I adored and now five years later, they’re releasing their second album A World On Fire under Long Branch Records. With their blistering, break-neck audio assault comfortably developed over the past 5 years, their latest effort is sure to pack a punch.
A World On Fire wastes no time getting started. A short swell into a fast paced battering-ram of a riff is what to expect on Black Dogs, the first single released in May of 2020. (That pandemic you might’ve heard about affected the release window, so A World on Fire has been quietly ablaze for a while before finally being released.) With a catchy chorus in tow and a nasty breakdown, it’s a wisely placed taster of the type of music you can expect over the following nine tracks. The Rising Tide and Walls of Jericho (the latter featuring Cabal vocalist Andreas Bjulver providing some triple-X-rated gutturals) follow in a similar fashion, with killer choruses and low tuned palm mutes in the verses by guitarists Mark Byrne & Paul Doughty.
The chorus riff on Our Demise sounds just like the ‘I Can’t Be The Only One’ by Killswitch Engage’s main melody, but the verse note choices are absolutely The Five Hundred. A World On Fire isn’t a radical departure in sound from 2018’s Bleed Red but it feels more honed in on the elements they’ve made their own. The tight Meshuggah-esque pinpoint precision rhythms from guitar, bass and drums and note choices prominent on Our Demise & Walls of Jericho are absolutely their own. Even more impressively, the entire sound including the guitar tones and visceral screams of John Eley are unmistakably them. Hearing those signature punishing palm mutes on your Release Radar will allow you to easily recognise these guys.
While the sound does deviate for slightly more experimental tracks like With Scars and the emotionally charged closer A World On Fire, it does suffer from repetition. Each track is enjoyable but doesn’t do much to provide something different than the last track did. Credit is certainly due in the respect of cohesiveness; the album slots together nicely without any element feeling forced or unwelcome, but the variety on offer is very limited. A World On Fire will likely include one or two songs demanding a position on your regular playlist, but it doesn’t diversify itself enough to make the majority of songs stand-out.
A World On Fire is what you could’ve expected in this near post-apocalyptic existence we call reality from a band as passionate as The Five Hundred. There is a near tangible sense of anger and frustration bubbling at the surface, popping with every pissed-off riff and raw scream, but that can only go so far. The unique sound they have become adept at creating means there are less, stylistically speaking, new flavours to experience. 
(3 / 5)
