Two weeks ago on my doorstep: Twelve Tribes’ The Rebirth Of Tragedy, an album released in may, which somehow took a startling five months to get here. The post-office must have taken a detour via Chinese Tai Pei and south-east Malaysia with this CD before reaching the east of The Netherlands. Oh well, I guess there are still people in the world who don’t know this album, have heard of it, and want to know whether to buy or not. Here’s the answer: “BUY, idiot!”

Twelve Tribes stem from Dayton, Ohio. I googled the place, it has a population of 167,000, a couple of gay bars, and 14 stripclubs. ‘Normal stripclubs’. ‘The Rebirth Of Tragedy’ is Twelve Tribes’ second full-length, following up ‘As Feathers To Flowers and Petals To Wings’ an EP, a long hiatus and line-up changes. They made metal-core kind of music, which they then grew tired of, because of the huge similarities between so many metal-core bands. They started to do something different, without clinging to a certain style.
Their current music sounds like Lamb Of God, Killswitch Engage, Skinlab, 40Grit, End Of April, metalcore (no use to name bands there) and a touch of emo –instrumentally that is- mingled into one. The music is epic. I hereby label it ‘Epic Metal’. The band wants every song to be something special. To stand out. They try to get every emotion into every song and that works really well.

First thing that stands out are the venomous screams and grunts of singer Adam Jackson, a big man with huge dreadlocks, like Phil Lebonte of Shadows Fall. Jackson seems to be really, really angry. His voice is fantastic, because in all that anger, there is a lot of emotion. You can almost feel this man’s pain and agony. He also has quite a wide vocal range, as he has a brilliant clean singing voice and can rap a little as well. Guitarist Kevin Schindel provides occasional back-up singing, which is also nicely done. The ‘singing’ isn’t overdone like on some of Killswitch Engage’s songs.

The guitars and percussion are versatile, emotional and powerful and make a perfect partner for the vocals. All the songs on this album seem right (‘Luma’ for only eighty percent). All the transitions seem right, every riff and drum-kick seems right. Every song has an epic feel to it, which doesn’t tire until the very last song. Then again, who the hell listens to whole albums every time he puts one on. This is a record not to be taken lightly. It can’t even be taken lightly. People who take this lightly, don’t deserve to listen to it.
Absolute highlights are: ‘The Train Bridge’, ‘Flight Of The Pathogen’, ‘Baboon Music’, ‘Translation Of Fixes’. Only song I’m not sure about is ‘Luma’, song nine, the rest is almost equally great as the aforementioned highlights.