At the Soundawn and their Red Sparowes-referencing moniker are a metalcore band from Italy, and they really like latter-day Isis. I should get this out of the way up front—as an unabashed metal snob I'm pretty much disposed to hate anything like this, so it's a testament to their fairly accomplished, well-played debut, Red Square: We Come In Waves that this actually isn't bad. In fact, for what it does, it's pretty darn good; if you've found yourself wishing that melodic metalcore á la Shai Hulud or Misery Signals had more of a post-metal influence, then run out and pick this up. I don't see myself returning to this, but I can recognize a job well done, and the songwriting here is actually quite a bit better than what's typical for the genre as of late.

So, the music -- take a fairly typical melodic metalcore band, but give the heavy parts a bit more heft and low-end, and when the clean-singing pretty parts come, have them go on Isis/Rosetta-esque spacey tangents, and you've got At the Soundawn. Vocalist Mirco has a suitably hoarse hardcore roar -- not the gnarliest I've ever heard, but better than many. His clean vocals are well done in that A Perfect Circle sort of way that most metalcore bands these days seem to prefer; it's not my thing by any stretch, but I've heard far worse. That said, the singing sections are my least favorite parts of the EP (they're calling it an album, but at 28 minutes, I don't think so), and my favorite parts seem to come when the instruments do the singing. There are some great instrumental ideas on here, especially around the four-minute mark of "Phone Will," where trumpets bring the rhythmic throb to a stirring climax; more parts like this, and Red Square would have received a higher score.

Bands like At the Soundawn are always the most difficult for reviewers, methinks, because if I were a different sort of reviewer, this would probably get a different score. Don't mistake my apathy for anything more than the snobbery of someone who's listened to too much metal for far too long: Red Square: We Come In Waves is a very well-done EP that effortlessly achieves everything it sets out to, and crams a fairly "epic" sound into succinct 3-5-minute songs. As for me, At the Soundawn serves as a slightly amusing reminder that post-metal, for all its post-aspirations, grew directly out of metalcore; make of that whatever you will. I'm not above Isis and their ilk, and I feel like, if At the Soundawn would drop the clean vocals and stretch out more, they'd be more my type of band. But even as they are, they're vastly better than the hordes of faceless metalcore hordes cluttering up the metal scene as of late.

-Lucas Kane