Raise the Remains

With their staggered riffs and earnest vocals, today’s hardcore and screamo bands do more chugging and crooning than any acts since the Rat Pack. Often, these attempts to marry modified metal and heartfelt warbling just sound silly, like overcompensatory flexing from impotent musclemen. Kansas City’s Raise the Remains expertly balances these elements on its debut disc, Fragments of a Tragedy. Its platonic melodic passages never become sickeningly sweet, and its heavy outbursts aren’t too scary for listeners lured by its harmonies. Even its minute-long title track thrives on contrast: A back-mixed shout haunts a piano hook like a distant tornado approaching wind chimes. Without breakdowns, which are to this genre’s fans what bass thumps are to dudes with speaker-filled trunks, this compositional craft would mean little. So the quintet uses the insanely popular stutter-step slow-down segments in every imaginable position. Breakdowns open and close songs, play call-and-response with singer Creighton Bibbs’ tuneful choruses and screamed slogans, trade off with crystalline guitar leads and, on the spectacular album ender “Faith to Flames,” cap a climactic drumroll.