Arizona's Tolerance have made quite a name for themselves these days having already stirred up a bunch of major label record interest with their last offering, "Earth In Real Audio" and the subsequent demos that followed. Now with this their third full-length effort now in stores, the group look to capitalize upon their buzz and take their sound to the next level. When judging by the material on hand here it appears that the next level for the band is a melodic brand of driving hard rock with a few shades of metal, as "Faster Crashes Harder" finds them delivering such punchy emotion track after track.

With emphatic vocals that can evoke similarities in tonal range to that of a more aggressive and weathered version of Alien Ant Farm frontman Dryden Mitchell, the groups music is honest sounding and very open book as vocalist Cory Spotts continually croons out his words with his heart worn on his sleeve. The guitar work is edgy and sticks to its guns as various spiraling build ups and swooping distorted swats are laid into place. In fact the structuring of the riffs is quite complex and yet still injects the songs with a whirring sense of energy that makes its mark by constantly pushing forward. The bass lines add some steady rhythmic ground for the songs to stabilize themselves upon as looming drawn out notes paint a wide eyed low end landscape. The drumming hits hard however and stays fairly charged up from start to finish. Skillfully played, some delicate sounding cymbal work provides a nice buffer while pointed beats and pounding rolls steadily blaze up the tracks.

Without question the band have evolved their craft into a highly refined package and their musical ability and compositional skills have really come around to a point where the songs feel intricately layered. This tighter approach gives the material a considerable sense of urgency and ensures that they progress onward at a rapid pace. Unfortunately though, the album generally lacks any real inspiration in terms of varied song writing. To elaborate, almost every track follows a similar path and each follow the guidelines of hard rock radio sensibility with little to no unexpected variation. They do try to throw in some breakdowns and curve balls on occasion but they're rarely developed enough to take the listener down a different path than that which the album is firmly locked into which eventually causes it to become rather monotonous. It's not so much that the band are untalented or writing pointless drivel however, its just more that they are trapped in one mindset and have their material so compacted within it that its hard to fully digest it. The songs rarely open up and suck the listener in and are far too rigid in tempo to really provide a cathartic release. Its a shame that this is the case too as the group have all the skills necessary to create some astonishingly beautiful music. Perhaps with a stronger emphasis put on dynamics and more varied song writing they will go on to achieve great things but for now they only seem to be gaining speed as they go around in circles.