No Rain, No Rainbow

It’s obvious from the first few ferocious bars of opening song “Seven Hours” that No Rain, No Rainbow is straight-up metalcore. (Producer Cory Spotts has helped give the band’s fourth studio album its most feral sound to date). A high-end boutique microphone puts frontman Ryan Zimmerman’s wild temper-tantrum vocals under the studio magnifying glass to sound like a man possessed as he screeches, howls and wails like he is being transformed into the very demons that torture him. But sometimes it’s companions that inspire this kind of heavy catharsis, as evidenced by the brutal assault of “Friends Are Friends For Never” where the mechanical-sounding drums fire off like machine guns under blazing guitars, cannon-heavy bass blasts, and Zimmerman shrieking like a ravenous, raving harpy from hell. A fountain of explosive guitar leads erupts at the top of “Jealousy Breeds Killing Sprees” before Zimmerman’s tripled vocals (one deep, one high and one slowed down) sound so evil that they make the bedeviled voice of Linda Blair’s head-spinning character in The Exorcist sound like Karen Carpenter.