Artist: The Ongoing Concept
Album: Saloon
Genre: Post-Hardcore
Label: Solid State Records

The Ongoing Concept may have existed for less than five years, but their most recent effort, Saloon, shows that they have all of the capabilities of keeping up with (and eventually, outdoing) some of the bigger heavy mainstay acts of today. The crazier part? This is only their debut full length.

Obviously, Solid State knew exactly what they were doing when they scouted out this quartet from their residence of Rathdrum, Idaho. When you really think about it, it doesn’t take much to gain local recognition in such a low-population area, but it takes a lot of guts, hard work, skill, and creativity for a Christian post-hardcore band to land a label contract, and that’s just what is displayed loud and proud on Saloon; guts, hard work, skill, and creativity.

Upon giving the album my first spin, the most distinguishable characteristic of  The Ongoing Concept is the fact that they are absolutely insane musicians. Boasting versatility and technicality, they’ve developed a sound that can appeal to the general public with its overall catchiness, and with metal heads for it’s overwhelming sense of complexity: all without being considered head music. You know, “head music,” like those bands that some snobs pretend to like just because their guitarist can shred a guitar on some Egyptian scale or their drummer can play three different time signatures simultaneously on three limbs?

One of my most favorite things about the album is the variety of unique sounds on a track-by-track basis. Without giving too much away, the dialogue on the intro track shows that something big is on the way, and that’s where the album’s title track delivers by providing a little bit of everything. At times, there are some of the most intense moments I’ve heard from this sort of heavy music in 2013 (“Class Of Twenty-Ten,” and “Goodbye, So Long My Love”). The more melodic songs that boast soaring vocals rather than shredding screams hold up quite well while pulling in a blatant influence from jazz music and the king of pop himself (“You Are The One,” and “Failures And Fakes”). Keyboards have a prominent role on the record as well, and do a great job at diversifying TOC from the rest (“Sidelines”). There are even the songs that have a definite and distinctive twang about them, like “Little Situation” and “Sunday’s Revival,” where there’s a strong influence of western show tunes.

On the flip side, one of the main faults of the album lies on the fact that while the band succeeds with getting the listener excited in the first half of the album, it feels like as if there’s a bit of a stumble in terms of creativity during tracks six through nine that could drive some to boredom. In all fairness, this is more common than most would think, it’s just that if there were more parts that could just pop out and roundhouse kick you in the face, Saloon would have a nice and even flow.

At the end of the day, there is only one Ire Works, there is only one Hot Damn!, there is only one Fake History, and there is only one The Shape Of Punk To Come … and it should definitely stay that way, but if just the right factors get tweaked for their next album, The Ongoing Concept could very well be onto something much bigger now that they’ve established their identity with the scene.

SCORE: 8.75/10
Reviewed by: Adrian Garza (Follow him on Twitter)

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