Philadelphia's One Dead Three Wounded play a relatively refreshing brand of metalcore that seems to draw lightly from a number of places to deliver a sound that slightly lacks in cohesiveness but is well-done nonetheless. There's a little bit of Botch's angularity and the facetiousness and dynamics of early Every Time I Die, with many moments leaning much closer to straight up, Darkest Hour-style metal than the 'core' in the term.

Lyrically, One Dead's songwriting seems to center either around grandiose imagery (i.e. Converge) or occasionally well-worded personal confessions (i.e. Modern Life Is War), sometimes combining the two into ferociously adept phrases. There may be some iffy amounts of gun, blood, and heart references, but it's lines like "Those towers of money, power, and greed are the tombstones of this ghost town" and "I scream into this dead microphone for myself and no one else" that tend to match the haunting, heavy and dark atmosphere surrounding it.

As previously mentioned, it's the slightly melodic but chugging guitars in tracks like "Ghosts" and "Burning Bridges Is So 1999..." as well as similarly genre-themed axes in "Farewell" that lean much more towards a stand-alone metal genre, hinting at, again, the aforementioned Darkest Hour.

There's the frequent press-enhanced mention of a Southern flavor, and that's sometimes apparent, but most especially at the end of "Ghosts."

While lacking in memorability for a good majority of its running time, One Dead Three Wounded prove with the album they're most definitely one of the better metalcore acts going. The reissue of Paint the Town here offers a very aesthetically pleasing, beige-dependent digipak layout with a stencil-style diecut slipcase as well as two bonus tracks that sound very much a part of the album.

Recommended.

MP3
Soldiers

STREAM
Burning Bridges Is So 1999...
Cardia