I recently stated that I haven’t cared about hard music in something like eight years. While that’s true, there is one exception.

Even as I dismissed the more fist-in-the-air tastes of my youth in favor of more cerebral tastes like folk, electronica, Krautrock, and the like, As Cities Burn’s debut has always been near the top of my favorite albums.

And not just for sentimentality, though there is that. This record came into my life within my first year of finding Christ, and having recently returned to my Heavenly Father, I had come to identify strongly with the parable of the Lost Son. The title predicts that theme easily enough, but one of the major motifs is the pain left in the lives of the brother singers after their earthly father had abandoned them as children, which in ways mirrored the struggles I was going through with my own father at the time. And in the middle of The Widow, a chorus resounded in my heart. “I believe that there’s something here to be learned of grace, ‘cause I can’t help but love you even with the mess you’ve made.” Then there are the lines that made me see the secret parts of myself, i.e., “Oh my God, how sweet is this sound/I once was blind but now/I just look away”;“there’s a whole world out there/but I’ve grown to love this bed too much to leave it”; “What is love without trust?/At my word would you bring Me your Isaacs?” That last line made me wonder if I was idolizing music itself, and made me consider throwing all of my CDs out, including this one.  It’s a strange sort of power to make someone consider destroying your art to follow their conscience, but such is the power of this album.

Not that it’s all heavy-handed, finger-pointing spiritualism. This is one of the most finely played records of the mid-aughts screaming scene. As Cities Burn wisely avoids the drop-tuned palm mute chugs and mosh ready breakdowns of their contemporaries in favor of serpentine guitar lines wrapping around one another in a way that has learned more from Further Seems Forever than Norma Jean. They also spend more time than their peers in hushed, pensive melodies that serve as deep sighs between the balls to the wall catharsis of their loudest moments. The entire album traffics in minor keys until the last forty seconds, where on Of Want and Misery: The Nothing that Kills the band strikes a major chord under the triumphant chant. “I can’t save you, but I will love you/I like to think that this is love/lost in second chances without end.” And in a time now in my life where musicianship almost always triumphs over sentiment, it’s comforting to revisit an album from the days where sentiment ruled over all and find both sides fulfilled.