It wasn't too long ago that Underoath made my list of supremely awesome bands that no one had heard of.  Now, with their fourth offering, people are starting to notice (What's up, Warped Tour!), but the stuff that I liked about them then is pretty much gone. 

Their first two albums were more or less EPs in the number of tracks they contained, but they clocked in around 55 minutes a piece.  On Act of Depression and Cries of the Past, Underoath explored a sound that mixed the epic song length of Opeth with the black/industrial metal of Cradle of Filth.  Singer Dallas Taylor screamed his freaking lungs out, while drummer Aaron Gillespie provided a low-end death growl.  The songs more or less worked, but with most of them hovering around the seven-minute mark, they kind of overstayed their welcome.  Basically, Underoath tried to cram too much stuff into one song, which made it come out mildly incoherent. 

Somewhere along the line, someone must have told them that because their third disc, The Changing of Times, not only increased the song count to 10, but also shortened the songs' length to something more acceptable to the ADD-infused attention span of today's listeners.  The riffs were as crisp and crunchy as fresh celery, the songs were long enough to prove their point but not so long as to get boring, the production was totally sweet and basically the album has stayed in solid rotation with me for the past couple years.  In short, The Changing of Times was just that, a turning point for the band that heralded awesome things from this Florida sextet.

However, not too long after Changing... came out, Taylor left the band to spend more time with his family (these are good Christian kids, after all), and the band was more or less dead, or so I thought.  Not so, as former Eso Charis vocalist Spencer Chamberlain stepped in to fill the void.  I'm not a huge Eso Charis fan, but their songs were decent, and Chamberlain's vocal style mimicked Taylor's enough to allow Underoath to be able to play their older stuff.  Happy happy, joy joy.

I bought They're Only Chasing Safety pretty much the day it came out.  The band had posted a couple of the songs from the album on some damn site, and they were good enough to warrant a new purchase of the album. (This is contrary to my usual course of action, which is to wait for it to show up used on Djangos.)  What I heard on ...Safety was not a metal band anymore, but almost a straight-ahead emocore band.  The shift isn't as jarring musically as between Cave-In's albums Until Your Heart Stops and Jupiter, or vocally as between Embodyment's Embrace the Eternal and The Narrow Scope of Things, but it *is* pretty significant.

Gone are 90% of the power chords, 99% of the double-bass drums and about 70% of the aggression.  In their stead I find slick and clean guitar work, solid if unimpressive drumming by Gillespie and a strict pop structure to all of the songs.  While not as formulaic as Atreyu's The Curse (in which it's always a shouted verse and a sung chorus), it's not as successful either.  I mean both "Boy Brushed Red Living in Black and White" and "It's Dangerous Business Walking Out Your Front Door" are decent tunes and all, but Underoath just sounds like they lost the spark that made them metal musicians and are a band in transition.  Imagine if the songs of Thursday or Open Hand revolved around screamy instead of sung vocals.  It wouldn't sound right, would it?

That's my biggest problem with ...Safety.  It's not that it's a *bad* album, the pieces just don't quite fit together.  If Chamberlain just gave up on the screaming (which he could do, since his range is far and away better than Taylor's) and just sang, with Gillespie providing a bit of harmony here and there (which he did on Changing... and continues to do here), I think Underoath's music and vocals would jell more.  Conversely, if they decided to put the metal back into the music, that would work as well.  As it is, we're left with a band that's in transition from metal to emo/rock, and Underoath is just not quite there yet.  To relate again, Embodyment's second album with their new singer, Hold Your Breath, came together much better than The Narrow Scope....  I'll hold out hope that Underoath can find that sort of cohesion on their next release.

Rating: Apples 'n' 16p nails out of 10