ALBUM REVIEW: Armour of Angels – Guilt Trip

Duct tape your sneakers for the two steps are strong on this album. Heed our warning or risk them flying across the room like a strapless Wii remote. Armour of Angels stands as a pretty pivotal album for Mancunian Metalcore heroes GUILT TRIP. Any rock festival you’ve been to over the past few years, you’ve likely spied a significant uptake in GUILT TRIP T-shirts flocking the pits. A pretty solid cult following in the scene, it’s this kind of album which will knight them big dogs on campus if they weren’t already.

Opening with One By One, the record immediately has a menacing aura to it. An intro reminiscent of METALLICA’s Battery, once the slashing riffs come flying, there’s no turning back. Lead singer Jay Valentine is out for blood whilst the unhinged solos and squealing harmonics are as cut-throat as ever. If there’s one takeaway from the record, there is absolutely no leg room for wasted notes in this turbulent album.

With song titles such as Cut from God and Resurrected (as well as the album title), the record offers a beautifully apocalyptic/biblical context. Take album closer The Banner of Heaven where the breakdowns feel like Heaven and Hell have collided and combusted as one. To be fair, you could pick out any of the blistering riffs scattered across the album, there really isn’t any kind of let up from front to back. Although Burn probably takes the crown for the most earth-shattering intro. Kudos to guitarists Jak Maden and Sam Baker.

Though the brutal and fast-paced catharsis is the succulent meaty protein of the record. The band offer layers to their work with melodic choruses in tracks like Dirt. The composure of the choruses offers a poised yet scathing atmospheric depth, colouring the rampant foundation of the record with a sinister elegance.

But in that same right, the majority of the tracks have a HATEBREED/KUBLAI KHAN TX tinge to it, i.e. a ‘I’ll kick the shit out of you if you look at me funny’ kind of element. And that’s what we came for, right?

Sticking with Angel Eyes, Valentine unleashes a damning cry of “I know god forgives but I fucking don’t”. Or you can skip to No Love Lost where he bellows “Forge my fist into a bullet before I send it through your fucking teeth”. It takes some pretty powerful lyrics to match the firepower the band behind him are firing out, but he’s more than up to the task. Valentine’s lyrics have an unhinged, violent and unforgiving element to it and this is what really sets the heart racing.

All in all, Armor of Angels gallops with the fury of demonic blood cells terrorising a steroid-infused bicep and could probably entice Gandhi to engage in fisticuffs. If someone has a number for WWE, GUILT TRIP have a plethora of walkout tracks for the next WrestleMania. The royalties are good, or so we hear.

Rating 8/10

Armour of Angels is out now via Roadrunner Records. 

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