Obey the Brave isn’t doing anything out of the box here; instead, they tinker with a winning formula. Back in 2009, A Day to Remember released Homesick, a fun, catchy, and overall quality record that can be charitably described as Cork Tree-era Fall Out Boy with breakdowns. The combination worked, but A Day to Remember stayed heavily on the pop-punk side of the fence—opening number “The Downfall of Us All” begins on a pop-punk riff repurposed as a breakdown. Obey the Brave approaches a similar idea from a different direction. Imagine if Sick of It All and Hatebreed decided that A Day to Remember had a good idea with Homesick, but it wasn’t heavy enough. Instead of adding breakdowns to pop-punk, the better plan was to implement some strains of pop-punk into songs focused around chugging and breakdowns. Instead of changing the breakdowns to fit the pop-punk, the pop-punk would be brought to the gym, made to bench, and fed red meat until it was burly like the Hatebreed and Terror metallic hardcore base. Well, not quite as burly, but it can hang. The secret weapon on Balance is structure. It begins with three swift mid-paced metalcore crowd-pleasers with big chugs and bigger hooks, moves to the slower beatdown of “Reality Check,” shifts over to guitar-driven melodic metalcore, and finishes on the fastest and most aggressive material on the record. The advantage of organizing the songs like this lies in giving Balance flow and direction, sating but not oversaturating listeners with one “type” of song and then switching to what would work best next in a live setting. This is all done across nine songs in slightly under half an hour, and Obey the Brave retain their own recognizable style throughout, not changing sound arbitrarily but rather exploring the obvious extensions of their core idea of extremely hooky metalcore.
