It's hard to be original anymore when playing any form of rock music and even harder to stand out when you're trying to sound similar to already-existing acts. No Harm Done are a melodic hardcore band from Florida who play their style by the book and not much else, as the idol worship of Strike Anywhere is clearly heard in the music and even seen in the artwork for the album.
This record has everything a melodic hardcore album should, plus a few things that are best left out: gritty vocals with little regard for melody, harmonic singing moments to offset the previously mentioned vocal style, background screaming, gang-vocal choruses, fast guitars dressed in distortion paired with drumming that easily keeps the pace and the ever-popular (and completely tiring) socially-conscious lyrics.
I don't know when it became popular to start injecting fast and sloppy punk songs with nice and friendly (read: weak) singing in the background, but it's annoying and shouldn't be happening. And the socially conscious lyrics...Christ, if there's a predictable aspect of melodic hardcore bands, it's the lyrics. There is an absolute overflow of bands that write political lyrics and it's been clear for a long time that some are MUCH better at it than others. No Harm Done are not saying anything new, though it's not a bad thing that they are interested in politics.
However, what they do that's so commonplace in melodic hardcore is done quite well (save for the lyrics), especially when considering that the band's members are all in high school. The problem is that too much of it runs together and the songs tend to be on the longer side, which in most cases with this kind of music is a bad thing. Very few people want to hear three-to-four-minute songs that sound like this, unless it's fucking epic and therefore has excellent songwriting throughout. A good example of a band that knows how to write quality "epic" melodic hardcore songs is Rise Against - and even theirs, as good as they can be, get a little tiresome after awhile.
No Harm Done are young, and have plenty of time to grow and learn. If anything is apparent after listening to this record it's that they are capable musicians. But if they want to hold someone's attention for longer than a few minutes they need to cut down the length of their songs and stop coloring inside the lines that define so clearly what is and what is not melodic hardcore.
