I enjoyed a handful of tracks off of Silent Civilian’s 2006 debut, Rebirth of the Temple; I seem to recall “Bitter Pill” having a pretty cool guitar solo and a catchy chorus. It was certainly better than front man Jonny Santos’ other, more famous band, Spineshuck. So we were stoked to hear what SC came up with for their sophomore effort.

Unfortunately, the new song they debuted last April, “The Last One Standing,” was, in Vince’s words, “a little bit meh.” And a new track the band has just debuted at Revolver, “Atonement,” is pretty much more of the same.

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Silent Civilian’s 2006 debut Rebirth of the Temple was a really fucking solid record, a shining example of metalcore done right at the peak of the genre’s popularity. The riffs crushed, melding American core and Swedish shred with the now infamous Decibel-named “good cop / bad cop” vocal style, only at the time it hadn’t been beaten to death yet. Who woulda thunk that any member of Spineshank could shred so hard? Rebirth also benefitted from ginoromous Logan Mader production (Gojira, Psycroptic, Cavalera Conspiracy). I remember really digging the record at the time, so I was elated to hear that from a press release that Silent Civilian are working on a new record, Ghost Stories, for release this October.

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In hindsight, that time you were a kid and went camping with your friends and some sketchy dude in a car rolled up out of nowhere and rolled his window down just an inch and spoke real low so you’d have to get close to his car because he was probably trying to abduct and rape you might seem like a funny story to tell people – but it doesn’t mean you’d necessarily wanna re-live it. I mean, it probably sucked at the time, the realization that you were a half-step away from living out a Friday the 13th movie.

So Spineshank have gotten back together.

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