When Gallows released Orchestra of Wolves and even Grey Britain later on, they were a unique—sounding hardcore band. But Wolves was released nine years ago and Grey Britain was released five years ago and ever since then unfortunately things have been going down hill for this band. The Chains/Wristslitter EP exemplifies that Gallows is progressively devolving into a mediocre metal band.

The song "Chains" has a long introduction (which granted, Gallows has done a few times before) that consists of a group of men and women singing softly to a creepy sounding guitar riff. This goes on for about a minute and fifteen seconds until the actual song starts. Lyrically and musically this song is not all that original or creative. Musically it's repetitive and quite frankly boring. There's really only one slow guitar riff in the chorus and another slow, but incredibly distorted guitar riff during the verse. After the verse and chorus switch off a couple times, there is a bridge that brings back the same riff and female singers from the introduction and then the song pretty much repeats again. The lyrics are also very repetitive for both the chorus and the single verse. The only word to describe this song is tedious.

The song "Wristslitter," while it's better than "Chains" and it has more of the sound Gallows originally had, also isn't that great. It too, leans more towards sounding like a slow metal song than anything else. The guitars are so overly distorted that the riffs are hard to make out until the singing stops. The lyrics could have been better as well: "I'm no better than this/I could just as soon slit my wrists" and then right after that the back—up vocalists sing: "Find a better way/Find a better way" for the chorus. Again, there's a lot of repetition in this song and it too, gets a bit tiresome and tedious to listen to.

Note to my fellow vinyl nerds:
300 copies of this EP were pressed in "clear—with—smoke" vinyl and 700 copies were pressed in gray.