On A New Beat from a Dead Heart, the listener is blessed with some of the band's most ambitious, heaviest, and fastest material to date. Instant classics like the slightly reworked yet even more pulverizing "Angel Strike Man" and the harrowed "Resurrect to Destroy" easily match up with old favorites like "Blood" and "When Death Closes Your Eyes." But what's all the more amazing is that the band wields that same creative touch that may have actually damaged their oldest albums in some fans' eyes, and employs it differently here to consistently positive results. The aforementioned "Resurrect to Destroy" finds frontman Robert Fish / Rasajara rhythmically singing under a level of distortion and in front of modestly wailing guitar riffs during the verses, bass-less, to which it creates a fantastic dynamic to where he begins to heed warning during the chorus: "Resurrect to destroy / resurrect to destroy / resurrection into annihilation." Rasajara talks up a utopian world in "The Sad Truth" -- literally, as the track's almost completely his spoken word reflected by his bandmates' fairly leveled musical ongoings. The one other mellow offering is "Walk Through Walls," a reggae-inflected, old-school post-hardcore jaunt that sounds like a jam session involving Bad Brains and Fugazi, with Rasajara howling the chorus in gloriously MacKaye fashion.
01. Declarations On A Grave 02. Guilt 03. Angel Stike Man 04. Three Hundred Liars 05. Resurrect To Destroy 06. Martyr Complex 07. The Sad Truth 08. My Redemption Song 09. Bibles + Guns = The American Dream? 10. (Il)Logical End 11. We Walk Through Walls 12. Our Kind 13. Repeat
