Source: official album artwork
To The Wind, hailing from Seattle, Washington, are quickly rising stars in the hardcore/metal crossover scene. Taking bits from hardcore along the lines of Defeater and Being As An Ocean and mixing it with slightly more metallic elements in the vein of The Ghost Inside and High Hopes, this album is as good on record as it sounds on paper.
The breakdowns, though a far overused medium in general at this point, are nonetheless very well excecuted and don’t appear frequent enough throughout to ever be annoyingly apparent. Similarly, the clean vocal additions had the potential to ruin the exciting hardcore energy of many of the songs, but by dialling them back and reserving their use only for the truly uplifting moments, their usage on the whole is justified.
Hats off to the producer on this album for enabling the band to sound as good as they should; the production is clean and crisp, and undoubtedly meant for a modern melodic hardcore band, but the guitars especially still sound like real guitars, not dialled in computer-produced jobs. The drums too, sound fantastic.
The Brighter View is not an outstanding album, but the “really good” moments are more than enough to push it far away from the ‘mediocre’ category.
Though this may be their third album, if To The Wind can continue their upward curve of improvement on future releases, and not get bogged down by the treacherous landscape that is the music industry, they may very quickly find a much bigger name carved out for themselves than even they might have suspected.
