Recently, a friend of mine showed me four albums that were new and which he liked.
I'm here to shun them (excluding one).
A Skylit Drive - Adelphia
With an album cover just being a single eyeliner-laden eye, it must mean something hardcore about the album. Nothing much to it though. Dream Theater was known for its epic progressiveness, and Adelphia tries to cover each progressive song on epic scale into simple 3-4 minute songs catered for simple listeners.
In the first place, it barely has enough ideas to do such things. Nothing more than the melodic singing + screaming that everyone is so comfortable with these days, and accompanying hammering guitars that anyone could so easily make with synthesizers. (I think they did.)
Secondly, where is the hardcore in all of this? There is no amount of left-field rhythm to Adelphia at all, and that's awful. It doesn't stand out at all, and the times it tries to be left-field (Worlds End in Whispers, Not Bangs), it doesn't realise that whatever it's done has been tried and tested.
Other than that, all it seems to do is copy gay piano ballads for saps, add screaming, add guitars, and now it's all 'hardcore'. I'm delightfully goosebumped.
E8
The Friday Night Boys - Off the Deep End
Powerpop has been known for its synth + rock band combination, with speedy, smooth streams of musicality. Powerpop sucks. I don't know why I'm saying this. Just saying is all.
The album starts its malaise in "Permanent Heartbreak", where the vocals sound constipated enough, but stretched even further by mechanical fixage from overlying synths and Auto-Tune. And it deprecates itself too, in lyrics. "Stupid Love Letter" seems to have slapped itself in the face, with an attempt at ironic, obvious lyrics, peppered with a seemingly happy "fuck me, fuck you" chorus breakdown. The Friday Night Boys don't realise that they have no idea how to fucking write fucking lyrics in the fucking sense of fucking irony, like fucking duh (hyperbole).
I'm happy enough to consider everything else one of those "Great Escape" gay poopy songs.
F9
Dance Gavin Dance - Happiness
Looking at the album cover, plus its album name, plus the band name itself, I assumed it was going to be one of those powerpop faggot drive. My friend assured me not, and that this band was really "herdcore".
Well it's screamo. I hate screamo. So mentally regurgitative, so mentally derogative.... It's power chorded guitars with double-bass padded drum kits, silly retarded screamo-melodic singing accompaniment a la Adelphia above.
This album teased me several times too. At "I'm Down With Brown Town", it suddenly went all funky-messed up, and I finally could catch a beat along with it. But it just collapsed into another gay melodramatic love song shit I've come around many times on the radio. "Carl Barker" also made a dive from its sporadic madness into a slow acoustic-electric pulse, but it just started abusing ghost notes and turned back into its black hole of stupendous songwriting and vocal chord abuse.
For a while there, for those few parts, I thought they were good screamo, like Masonna. I was wrong though. Go Masonna!
E8
Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca
My friend pretty much gave me this album, because he didn't like it. He took back the rest though. So hey, consider his horrid taste in music, how about check this out? I've already dwelved into some of the worst tunes on Earth for the last few albums, so I have got nothing to lose on Bitte Orca.
In a pleasurable art-rock manner, "Cannibal Resource", Bitte Orca's starter, includes chilly female hums, behind a swavery, somewhat faltering-yet-strong male vocal trailing the rest of the instruments into unpredictability. The next songs gave a breath of fresh air, despite hanging on to its dizzy spasm of voices and instruments.
The purposeful micro-nosedive of rhythms in the album allow for some big "whoosh" moments, where you're swept away by both its awkwardly pleasant sound and stunning recovery ability. And altogether, the Himalayas of highs-and-lows of the album pulsate around as you play the album, and touched up by the album highlight "Stillness is the Move", which in the middle of the record, plays itself as one big Mt. Everest.
Music at its rollercoaster-like best.
A1
