august burns red is an institution in today's metal scene. with increasing regularity, which means every two years, this u.s. five piece from lancaster, pa releases a new flawless album. at least that was the case in the past. so my expectations were set high for 'found in far away' places. it is the first record for their new label fearless records, which was unknown to me. after a quick research i found out that they released stuff from e.g. at the drive in and blessthefall, so now i can classifiy them in a musical context.
through lambgoat's 'upcoming releases' entries i heard of the news and set out to pre-order a copy. at first i only found pre-order options for the usa and the uk. i was close to order with the uk shop but then, suddenly impericon from germany came up with the european pre-order. so i was just a few clicks away from my new coloured copy of 'found in far away places'. with a few days delay it showed up at my doorstep.
after the first listen it was pretty clear that august burns red didn't get weaker one little bit. 'found in far away places' is a damn cracker from first tune to the last. this band seems unable to produce any crap. forceful and hymnic as always, they go the path further which they took ever since 'leveler'. there might be just one little threat, which is their tiny lack of progress. don't get me wrong, again they put all their heart into these songs with some lovely bits of folk, strings and horn sections, but it's nothing real new.
if you gave me 'leveler', 'rescue and restore' and 'found in far away places' without telling me any release dates, i couldn't tell the differences in evolution. the new record is absolutely great and i enjoy every bit, but for future releases this modi operandi holds the risk of boredom. anyway, get this bad boy, it's so good! i got the 'sea blue' version out of 500 copies, which seems to be somethink like an european edition because it was the only colour-way available. fearless records. 2015.
