This British band dropped this album back in February and just managing to catch up with it. They play a form of metal core that collides with nu-metal, which is becoming another sub-genre called nu-core. There is a Slipknot like collage of sound that explode into your ears that are at least being presented as if they are coming for the singer's tortured psyche. The guitars thump with the down tuned aggression that metal core adopted from nu-mtal in the post-Myspace landscape. "Into the Dark' continues to find the vocals yelled in a hard core manner with more emotional posturing. They render some convincing break downs on the second song .
The hyper aggressive temper tantrum continues of "Killing Floor" , but there is enough atmosphere dialed into give it the darker shade this kind of thing needs in order to convince. The Slipknot influence might be the heaviest thing going in their sound. "Sleepless" works more of the driving anger, and has less sonic nuance than the previous song. "White Noise" keeps things churning in the same direction with hear Slipknot head on "Iowa". There are swathes of sharp sounds that cut through the attack of the guitar, but the overall effect feels more like a Slipknot tribute with this one. Turntables are being manipulated which points it's finger in that direction for sure. Though this band consists only of five people so there is not an army of clowns involved.
"Bad Blood" is sadly not a Taylor Swift cover, which might have been more interesting than the JNCO flavored slab of riffs that hit you with here. The singer is far from Corey Taylor, so they are not making use of the power of melody to provide a counterpoint for what is going on. Any melody that is going to arrive is going to come from the guitars. "Twisted Fear" stomps and bounces in the exact manner you might expect this to go in. I think a band like Bloodlet did this sort of thing better pre-Slipknot. It is a shame that there is an entire musical movement going on that is not acknowledging bands like Bloodlet and Starkweather. I do appreciate when these guys experiment a bit and use sounds outside of the metal core norm. However there is just a redundancy in how the anger is delivered from there. I am all for nu-metal getting another shot, if the bands are learning from the mistakes the genre made on it's first run and not repeating them. Instead what is happening with this album is all the songs begin to sound the same after the try to inflict the same blunt force trauma.
The brooding "A Twin" is more of an interlude as it does not develop past the hushed muttering of the vocals that feels more like the intro of a Code Orange song than an actual song unto itself. The last song "the Downpour" pounds and prances in the sonic zip-code that they have been circling this entire album. Here lies the danger of metal core remarrying nu-metal is the child they make might be too inbred to not have the same defects. I will give this album a 7, as I like how dark it is, and the album has a good sound, though not song focused, touching on cool sounds, and there are great ideas that could be further developed as they progress as a band.
No comments:
Post a Comment