O' God, the Aftermath — Norma Jean

Norma Jean's second album, O' God, the Aftermath, came out on Solid State Records on March 1, 2005. It was the Georgia band's first record with singer Cory Brandan, who'd fronted Eso-Charis. It was also the first with bassist Jake Schultz. Josh Scogin, the voice on Bless the Martyr and Kiss the Child, had already left and started The Chariot. The lineup here is Brandan on vocals and guitar, Scottie Henry and Chris Day on guitars, Schultz on bass and Daniel Davison on drums. Matt Bayles, known for his work with Isis and Mastodon, produced it with the band. Howie Weinberg mastered it. It's eleven songs in just under forty-eight minutes, and it scores an 8/10.

What you're hearing

Every song title is two words jammed into one, plus a subtitle. The album opens with Murderotica: An Avalanche in D Minor. It runs through Bayonetwork, Liarsenic, Absentimental and Pretendeavor before it closes on the six-minute Scientifiction. Right in the middle sits Disconnecktie: The Faithful Vampire, and that one runs a full ten minutes.

The sound is metalcore that keeps jerking to a stop and lurching back to life. Two guitars trade jagged riffs. Sometimes they lock together and sometimes they pull apart, while Davison keeps throwing in complex fills. Brandan mostly screams. But he slips into real singing on a couple of tracks, and those moments land harder because they're rare.

AllMusic's Johnny Loftus wrote that the band hadn't lost any of its rage or passion with the new lineup. He said Brandan matched the pummel of the twin guitars, and that Bayles stripped away the reverb to reveal the band's gristle. He called the songs relentless. Their gaps, stops and starts, he wrote, and the interplay of single and dual guitars push the listener toward the meaning. He pointed to the moment in Bayonetwork where the pace drops away and Brandan shouts, "This is between me and this blade, and my heart." He heard a balance between pain and religious fervor, between hate and hope. And he said the band had wound its faith so tightly around its amplifiers that you couldn't pull the two apart. His highlights were Disconnecktie and Scientifiction, though he admitted the word-jumble titles were a little trying.

Jesus Freak Hideout's Josh Taylor took on the obvious question head on. He said Scogin's shoes were hard to fill. Brandan's range, he wrote, wasn't in the same league as a singer who could screech one moment and growl the next. Even so, he called Brandan's effort valiant and said his screams suited the wild, unpredictable guitar riffs. Taylor ended by calling it the best hardcore album 2005 had produced so far.

Greg Pratt at Exclaim! had called Bless the Martyr a landmark metalcore album. He thought the new one sounded pretty similar, and he mostly meant that as praise. He said Brandan had just as great a bellow as the man before him. He liked the melodic singing too, because it broke up the pummeling. He called Disconnecktie a totally crushing epic. His complaint was the ending. He said the last couple of songs left him beaten, bruised and anxious for the album to finish. He judged it not quite as shockingly good as the first album and put that down to high expectations. He still called Norma Jean the leaders of the metalcore movement. AbsolutePunk.net gave it 75 percent.

Over at Cross Rhythms, Tony Cummings admitted that another of the magazine's reviewers had heard little beyond a racket. Cummings heard more. He said the album went past metal and hardcore into a primal brew of cathartic pain. It was brutal, he wrote, but it had a strange elegance. He noticed the long instrumental passages, hypnotic riffing and complex drum fills, and he thought the band might be edging toward progressive metal. He also quoted HM magazine, which called the album so mysterious, revolting and deformed that unbelievers wouldn't notice its spiritual strength.

What it's about

The title can sound grim, but Davison said on Solid State's website that it was meant as a hopeful word. He said people hear "aftermath" as negative. He saw it as "a pleasant aftermath," looked at from a spiritual point of view: "the aftermath of grace or salvation." The original liner notes give the full title as O'God, The Aftermath: The Marvelous End of the Exhausted Contender.

The words printed across the front of the album are the lyrics to Coffinspire: Multitudes, Multitudes in the Valley of Decision! Those lyrics come from Joel 3:13-16, the passage about the harvest being ripe and multitudes gathering in the valley of decision. Pictures of ships and the sea drift through the rest of the record, and Pretendeavor has a sinking ship right there in its full title. Loftus quoted one of that song's lines, "Far from fear, we are," as an example of Brandan speaking straight and with force.

How it came together

Pretendeavor was the first music the band released with Brandan. An early version, named only by the song's subtitle, turned up on the label sampler This Is Solid State, Vol. 5. The band then re-recorded it with new parts and riffs for the album. Absentimental: Street Clam had an earlier working title too: Manipulateral: Street Clam.

The packaging, designed by Asterik Studio, was nominated for Best Recording Package at the 48th Grammy Awards. It was also up for Recorded Music Packaging of the Year at the 37th GMA Dove Awards. In March 2006, Solid State reissued the album as a CD and DVD. That version came with expanded artwork, about two hours of extra footage and a bonus song, ShaunLuu, which was also on the Masters of Horror soundtrack.

It was the band's first album to make the Billboard 200. It entered at No. 62 in the chart week of March 19, 2005, and it went to No. 1 on the Christian albums chart. Three songs got music videos: Bayonetwork: Vultures in Vivid Color, Liarsenic: Creating a Universe of Discourse and Absentimental: Street Clam.

Why 8/10

The big worry going in was whether Norma Jean could survive losing its singer. This album answered that inside two minutes. Brandan doesn't copy Scogin. He brings his own rough bark and a willingness to sing, and the band builds around him instead of waiting for the old voice to come back. Bayles keeps everything dry and close, so the stops hit like a door slamming.

Pratt's complaint is fair. Played straight through, the back stretch wears you out. The ten-minute Disconnecktie asks a lot of anyone who came for short, sharp blows. Some listeners will find the titles more tiring than clever, too. But the songs that hit, Bayonetwork, Coffinspire, Liarsenic and Scientifiction, hit as hard as anything on the first album. And the faith in them is out in the open, not tucked away. The band followed it with Redeemer in 2006. For more on the band, see our Norma Jean profile.

Start with Bayonetwork, then put on Liarsenic and Absentimental.