Name: Risk Revival *
Brand: Equal Vision
SKU: 1096473
Availability: OutOfStock

Performer Notes

Hot Cross: Billy Werner (vocals); Casey Boland (guitars); Matt Smith (bass guitar); Greg Drudy.
Personnel: Bill Werner (vocals); Casey Boland (guitar); Greg Drudy (drums); Josh Jakubowski (vocals).
Audio Mixer: Josh Jakubowski.
Recording information: Cannon Road Studios, Freehold, NJ (10/2006-11/2006).
Risk Revival is Hot Cross' second full-length and first after parting ways with founding guitarist Josh Jakubowski, but the Philadelphia natives appear to have fared just fine without him -- if you discount the album's suggestive title and the six-month period spent tinkering with the results prior to release in February 2007. Think Hot Cross are trying to tell us something? Anyway, with titles like "Exits and Trails," "Resent Resist Rebuild" and "Rejoinder," their songs certainly don't dispel this suspicion, and perhaps we're reading too much into this, but you never know with a band rooted in emo -- they tend to obsess about breakups, big time. In any case, most of Hot Cross' new material deals in a mixture of hardcore activism and heartfelt self-examination, while musically contrasting fundamental hardcore simplicity with fleet-fingered fretwork patterns (see "Turncoat Revolution," "Cardiac Silence," "Fatefully," etc.), and, notably, strictly clean vocals (no metalcore style grunting here) featuring the occasional screamo, errrr -- screaming -- but no whining! As such, most songs are imminently accessible without sounding forced or formulaic, as they might be if the band were making concessions to commerce. Rather, there's even room for departures, like the slow but insistent drive of "Silence Is Failure," and the acoustic origins of standout "Finance Fuels the Sickness at Heart." In other words, this is a fine, if hardly transcendent outing, but certainly one that, through all of the implied and admitted uncertainty surrounding its release, was well worth "risking the band's revival." ~ Eduardo Rivadavia

Professional Reviews

Alternative Press (p.138) - 3.5 stars out of 5 -- "Frontman Billy Werner somehow sounds like a younger, more invigorated version of himself, often delving into speak-sing territory and sometimes relying on a more straightforward hardcore intensity without shredding his throat..."

Kerrang (Magazine) (p.48) - "[T]heir songs update the lyrical noise of Husker Du for the 21st century, adding further muscle and speaker-shredding volume to the din."

Album: Risk Revival *
#	Song Title	Time
1)	Exits and Trails
2)	Turncoat Revolution
3)	Resent Resist Rebuild
4)	Fire the Foundations
5)	Cardiac Silence
6)	Kill the Name
7)	Silence Is Failure
8)	Fatefully
9)	Existence
10)	Rejoinder
11)	Finance Fuels the Sickness at Heart
12)	Blame Truth
13)	Scrape Wisdom

Album: Risk Revival *
#	Song Title	Time
1)	Exits and Trails
2)	Turncoat Revolution
3)	Resent Resist Rebuild
4)	Fire the Foundations
5)	Cardiac Silence
6)	Kill the Name
7)	Silence Is Failure
8)	Fatefully
9)	Existence
10)	Rejoinder
11)	Finance Fuels the Sickness at Heart
12)	Blame Truth
13)	Scrape Wisdom