The Massachusetts quintet with a Killswitch Engage guitarist behind the console ran two campaigns on one record, and had split its own ticket long before it reached the shops on 6 November 2012, the same day America went to the polls. Twelve tracks in under forty minutes on Razor & Tie, half of them campaigning for the floor of a club, half of them canvassing rock radio door to door. All That Remains carried both states. Only one of those wins still sounds like a landslide.
Tracked at Zing Studios in Westfield, Massachusetts, under Adam Dutkiewicz, a producer the singer had known for going on twenty years, by the same five who made For We Are Many, Philip Labonte on vocals, Oli Herbert on lead guitar, Mike Martin on rhythm, Jeanne Sagan on bass and Jason Costa on drums, the sixth album then travelled to Nashville, where Brian Virtue mixed it. Nothing changed but the hands on the faders, and that change came with a story. Dutkiewicz was not free to mix, and the test mixes that came back from bigger names appalled Labonte. "It's like you're shoving mashed potatoes into my ears," he told 94.3 KILO in Colorado Springs, in an interview transcribed by Blabbermouth on 17 August 2012.
Count the pit half first, because that is where the ballots were cast honestly. "You Can't Fill My Shadow" comes second in the running order and strips the gloss off the record like a belt sander taking the paint off a squad car, the riff chewing at the verses and a Herbert solo slicing straight through the middle. "A Call to All Non-Believers" is the throwdown, two minutes and forty four seconds of pure floor. "Sing for Liberty" runs hot and headlong. "Just Moments in Time", ushered in by a 21 second "Intro", keeps the barrage going. Not one of the four asks permission.
Only one of those wins still sounds like a landslide.
Then the campaign bus swings toward the radio stations. "Stand Up", the single built for rock radio, is a mid-tempo shout-along built to be sung back by a shed full of strangers, and it did exactly the job it was hired for: in February 2013 it reached No. 1 at American Active Rock radio, the first No. 1 radio single the band had ever had. Paul R. Brown, the man who also made the cover, shot its video on 3 October 2012 and dropped the band into a forest choking on smoke, with soldiers advancing through the smoke and a helicopter overhead. Subtle it is not. It works anyway.
"Asking Too Much", sent out as a single in March 2013, is melodic and tidy, and it climbed to No. 14 on the Mainstream Rock chart. "What If I Was Nothing" is the power ballad, sung clean from the first line to the last, and it became the biggest song on the record: No. 2 on Mainstream Rock, a Gold certification, a video of one couple going from childhood sweethearts to old age. The album itself entered the Billboard 200 at No. 13, on close to 25,000 copies sold in its first week. That is the landslide by the numbers. You can respect the numbers and still reach for the skip button.
The trouble is the seams. Across forty minutes the record lurches between the floor and the FM dial, the clean choruses land on schedule even inside the heavy songs, and the singles sound written for a format before they were written for this band. Labonte was harsher on it than any ballot count. "'A War You Cannot Win' had some of our biggest singles. I think, overall, the record, in general, sucked," he said on Jamey Jasta's podcast, The Jasta Show, transcribed by Blabbermouth on 6 October 2014. He was too hard on it. "Calculating Loneliness", Herbert's own instrumental, brings acoustic guitar into the back half like a breath before the last push, and the title track closes the record at speed, the pit half getting the final word.
Split the vote yourself. "You Can't Fill My Shadow", "A Call to All Non-Believers", "Sing for Liberty" and "A War You Cannot Win" make a hard, fast, honest metalcore EP from a band with a real lead guitarist in the room, and Herbert alone is reason enough to own it. The radio half paid for the tour bus and the Gold plaque, and it sounds like it. Fourteen years on, the floor half still moves the room, and the dial half is still cashing the cheques.