This Is How the Wind Shifts

A concept album within a concept album? That’s how Silverstein approached its seventh studio album, This Is How the Wind Shifts. These songs orbit around the idea that a person’s life can drastically change with a single event. But it gets more complex as each track plays alongside a companion track; the latter tune tells the same story in a different light than the one offered by the preceding song. “Stand Amid the Roar” opens with tense outbursts of raw screamo angst, as Shane Told segues between larynx-destroying shrieks and his boyish croon like a post-hardcore Jekyll and Hyde. Here his lyrics form the depiction of an emotional predator. The following “On Brave Mountains We Conquer” describes the same situation from the vantage of the emotional prey. The guitar playing here and throughout This Is How the Wind Shifts move with a similar yin-and-yang duality between Josh Bradford's foundational rhythmic style and the ascending leads of Paul Marc Rousseau, who sings on the solemn “Arrival.”