I usually have a little giggle to myself when I hear someone saying that a hardcore album is "emotional". I mean, how can a record be emotional when you can't make out a single word that the singer is saying, and the instrumentation consists of guitar noise wielded like a sledgehammer? It's rather perplexing. Strangely, "As The Roots Undo", despite being heavily influenced by hardcore, actually is somewhat emotional, and even contains a couple of isolated, solitary shades of subtlety.

Recorded a long while ago, this album almost never came out due to complications in the post-production process. Most of the problems revolved around the artwork and packaging, which I must say, are quite impressive. But were they worth the massive delay? Not really.

The main drawcard of this album is that the hype machines have been blabbering on about how it'll inject fresh air into the stale hardcore scene. They're partially on the money, this album is quite different. The whole loud/soft dynamic that has made an appearance on every hardcore album since Kurt Cobain was a boy are still here, but a few ideas that are new to this genre of music are also employed. Perhaps most surprising are the soundscapes constructed with overdubbed layers of guitars, My Bloody Valentine-style. Non-Objective Portrait of Karma, for instance, opens with a reverb-drenched soundscape just like this, something that I definitely was not expecting.

The problem with this album, is that while it's certainly ambitious and determined, sometimes the band's ideas haven't been thought out properly. The juxtaposition of more traditional hardcore passages, brimming over with blasts of heavily distorted guitar, and the more subtle "soundscape" passages is a good idea, but in practice, the focus usually ends up being on the loud parts, at the expense of the quiet parts. Maybe this is what the band actually had in mind, but I can't help but imagine that this would be a lot more interesting if the two styles were more evenly balanced.

This album will probably be of great interest to those who love hardcore music, as it's different and executed with enough skill to be superior to most of the other dreary stuff out there. I doubt that people who aren't into the genre will get much out of this, however.