BEST FIRST RELEASE 2010 Award Winner! 
Runners-Up: Sky Sailing (An Airplane Carried Me To Bed), Close Your Eyes (We Will Overcome), Submission Red (Vision Tour), Abel (Lesser Men), Shonlock (Where Never Begins).
Honorable Mentions: Shapes Stars Make (These Mountains Are Safe), Satellites & Sirens (Satellites & Sirens), Paper Tongues (Paper Tongues), The Letter Black (Hanging On By A Thread), Sixteen Cities (Sixteen Cities).
The Roar And The Whisper kicks off with great, memorable intro track “The Last Breath Of Self-Expectancy”. The track opens with sound effects and drumbeats, and then the guitars kick in along with a great interwoven vocal mix of lyricless background singing and a Screamo verse.
“The Lost And The Captor” is also memorable, with dynamic music, screamed verses, and a sung chorus.
“My Greatest Need” continues the screamed verse/sung chorus vocal formula, though this time with accompanying music that has a more pronounced melody of its own. This track also has a surprisingly delicate outro (which actually fits it well).
Title track “The Roar And The Whisper” features a double-layered rough-sung/screamed first verse, and several very well-placed musical and vocal shifts throughout.
“Irreversible” is another memorable track, with dynamic guitarwork and vocals that are actually mostly singing with some screaming just for emphasis.
“Deceiver” kicks the vocals back to mostly Screamo, and also speeds up the pace. There are some interesting musical shifts, too, particularly when the bridge considerably lightens musically while the vocals still remain screamed.
“The Rescue” is an instrumental that begins soft and slow and then builds in staggered steps to excellent Rock.
“The Bride” is an excellent heavy track that is surprisingly catchy and very memorable.
“Wolves” has unusual verses in that the vocals are screamed but have Rock ballad music underneath them, but this does work well combined with the sung chorus.
“Beaten, Betrayed, Denied” is another builds-in-steps interlude, though this one is not completely instrumental as it does contain some vocals as well.
“A Whistle Falls” initially features fast-paced heaviness, then shifts down into a great, long, slower-paced outro about halfway through its length.
Finally, closer track “Chasing” interestingly contains no screaming at all, and in fact is actually a medium ballad with no heavy elements whatsoever. Despite this stylistic difference from the rest of the album, it’s a good track.
In all, with its great Screamo/Rock blend and absolutely fantastic lyrics, The Roar And The Whisper is a great album, and worthy of Best First Release.
Our rating for The Roar And The Whisper: 5 & 1/4 Stars. 