ALBUM REVIEW: Welcome To The West Coast III – Lionheart
If you’ve ever heard even a single note of their music you should know exactly what you’re getting from LIONHEART by now. Representing Oakland, California, the heavy hardcore crew have spent nearly all of the past decade and a half doubling, tripling and quadrupling down on the high-aggro sound they’ve had pretty much nailed since their 2007 debut The Will To Survive. Choosing between their records seems a bit pointless given their general consistency and quality, but there does appear to be specific reverence for their Welcome To The West Coast series which now becomes a complete trilogy with the release of III this Friday.
From The Trilogy Intro’s opening assertions of “Oh shit, back again” and its gang vocal chants of “L H H C” which have often cropped up across the band’s discography, it’s clear LIONHEART are going to play this one exactly as they always have. A Lord Of The Rings comparison would be too generous, but something like the first three Die Hard or Indiana Jones movies where you’ve got three tonally consistent and generally solid instalments built on a particularly strong start certainly feels like an apt enough metaphor for the West Coast series at this point.
What that means is we get a lot of chugging riffs, some hip-hop-tinged bravado, and several truck loads of bellowed hooks that are clearly designed for as much crowd participation as possible. There isn’t a surprise in sight, but as long as you weren’t expecting one then you should leave satisfied enough. Produced by Jamey Jasta and mixed and mastered by Will Putney, there’s so much beef here you’ll probably have to hide it from your vegetarian friends, and it comes with just a light dash of seasoning in the form of the occasional squealed lead or quickfire solo from guitarists Nick Warner and Walle Etzel.
Beyond that, the big draw is the album’s impressive guest list. Jasta appears on two tracks himself, including the early highlight of Death Comes In 3’s whose gang vocal hook of “Life is a death sentence” leaves perhaps the most lasting impact of anything on the record. Elsewhere, Ice T delivers a typically swaggerful verse on the explicitly throat-grabbing Live By The Gun, E.TOWN CONCRETE’s Antmoney and DESMADRE’s Los show up on the respectively raging Stories From The Gutter Pt. II and At War With The Gods, and Alex Taylor of MALEVOLENCE lends his scorched lungs to closer Exit Wounds as cries of “Life is hell / So death must be heaven” and “If depression is a weapon bring the fucking armaggedon” deliver the album’s memorable final blows.
Lines like that point to a general bleakness that runs through the entirety of Welcome To The West Coast III, and yet this album never provides anything less than the kind of rocket-fuelled motivation that is typical to a lot of music like this. LIONHEART stare their struggles straight in the face, and in doing so they will likely inspire others to do the same. That’s more important than even the hardest breakdown, and arguably the main thing that makes this record worth your time.
Rating: 7/10
Welcome To The West Coast III is set for release on December 9th via Arising Empire.
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