After five albums Project 86 remain a conundrum – they are unapologetic about their faith but they should occasionally apologise for their music. On this occasion they should raise their heads just a little.

Artist: Project 86
Album: … And The Rest Will Follow
Label: Tooth and Nail
Tracks: 12
Running Time: 49 minutes






Project 86 have always toyed dangerously with concepts of faith in alien worlds, sometimes it has worked very, very well, as in their best album Truthless Heroes but, the but is significant, they don’t always know good from bad.

Here they snap down lock and load style and stun your ears but not often enough and too often coming off sounding like a poor man’s Static X. Andrew Schwab has a sufficient roar but he is always better crooning – using his voice rather than slapping it about. Check the layered to the point of atmosphere title track against the mediocre rumble rock of Subject to Change, which comes across as Korn desperately imitating The Cure.

It’s a good thing then that they use silence to fill the melody throughout … And The Rest Will Follow.

The Hand, The Furnace, The Straight Face is second only to the opening cut Sincerely, Ichabod, in terms of metal brutality but a smooth rock riff and a swaggeringly heavy chorus underpin it. The problem in critiquing Project 86 is their seriousness – it’s impossible to deny their intent and I’d always back them in a judgement day debate. Making a joke of them seems too easy but they have occasionally done it for us with lyrics like “your journals in crimson/her veins filled with red ink/your quill spills in crimson”. Schwab has always worn a second mask as a philosopher and academic, shrouding his songs in Orwellian nightmares and it seems he too believes the future is a boot stomping on all of us.