Senses Fail Kick Goals On Fifth Album

Renacer is the fifth full-length album from the New Jersey-based group that is Senses Fail. On first listen the fire of the release is quite striking – not to say that the band has never had an element of fury to them, but they've never sounded as heavy as they do in 2013. The usually melody-dominated vocals have been largely overtaken by frontman Buddy Nielsen's screams – the riffs are harder, the double kick more frequent, the atmosphere more brooding, and the breakdowns more triumphantly pronounced.

“I'd say I enjoy what we did on this record more so than what we've done in the past,” Nielsen admits. “I like the style, I like the direction, I like the heaviness. I sort of finally feel like I achieved at least part of what I wanted to achieve.”

The dynamic vocalist comes across as a little distant on the phone, and needs to be gently nudged along to elaborate a little more.

“Yeah, they were okay,” he says of the band's past efforts, the most successful of which was 2006's Still Searching, which peaked at number 15 on the US charts.

“Some of them were better than others – some of them were okay. I just think that there's a lot of things we could have done better on previous records.”

Such as?

“Just overall, I think we could have tried a little harder to do something different.”

It's true that perhaps the band's public perception melded a little into the background against the plethora of '00s era post-hardcore/screamo bands, but they were by no means followers of the flocks or latecomers to the party. Everyone's their own harshest critic, and it appears that it's hard for Nielsen to be completely satisfied with his own work, adding that “even with this record I see things that I wish I could have done better.”

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