LARIAT & AT WAR WITH SHADOWS: Discographies

I'm here to post up what I think is a discography for two amazing upstate NY metalcore bands. Lariat and At War With Shadows. While both bands have quite a similar style, AWWS leaned a bit more towards what was then a "modern sound" with Lariat taking more influence from their mid-90s predecessors. Both bands respectively released an EP as well as a split together in the early 2000s. I'm not too sure if either band ever released a demo, but I know that these are the only official releases from each band.

At War With Shadows was from Troy, NY. Seeing the release of their debut EP on Hater Of God Records, the band offered four tracks of rather ingenuous metalcore that can only be compared to the concept of From Autumn To Ashes being really, really good and axing their clean vocal parts. Regardless, At War With Shadows brings us considerably moshy metalcore with its fair share of melody and that touch of early 2000s metalcore that no one can quite describe. It was metalcore played by kids who were raised on progressive musicianship as played by bands like Aftershock, Blood Has Been Shed, Barrit and the likes.

I recently read two descriptions of Lariat and I honestly can't decide which one sums up the band more properly. The author of the Just Another Bombtrack blog described the band as Unbroken meets His Hero Is Gone meets Deadguy whereas a paper insert that just fell out of the EP from their label describes it as a mixture of Catharis, Burn It Down, and Acme. Regardless of which description fits better, I think you can imagine how good this band is.

Lariat featured ex-members of Tripface, Blood Has Been Shed and Monster X and members would later go on to form Burning Bridges and probably some of the better Albany bands happening today. While the music was as brutal and intense as anything else you've ever heard, the lyrical content of the band was the true attraction that I had to the band. "We are not immortal, this is not forever, if you knew you were dying tomorrow, how would you live today?" are the words I hear repeated in my head when I think back to their Hell Fest 2001 performance.

In a similar fashion to my If Hope Dies & Beyond Fall post I made several months back, I had the pleasure of seeing both of these bands perform at the best show of all time (aka Hell Fest 2001). It was also at this fest that I picked up all of these releases. As stated on several other blogs, the performances by these two bands were two of the more memorable sets of the weekend from such early day slots.

I say this in pretty much every other post I made but its a true shame that the metalcore genre has turned to such shit in the past decade. The musical and artistic possibilities of impassioned kids who grew up in the hardcore scene but then decided to expand their musical horizons through the practice of metal music were seemingly endless at the time and I'm quite saddened to see those possibilities thrown away at the prospect of whatever it is the bands of today are being driven by.

When I say Path To Misery is a mosh metalcore band, I have bands like the ones mentioned in this post in mind. If for some reason you're not understanding this concept yet ... watch this video of Lariat.



If anyone has any info or Mp3s of these bands' potential demos ... please get in touch.

DOWNLOAD THEIR COLLECTIVE DISCOGRAPHIES