Review Summary: A spectacular failure
I made my mind up about
The Resilient in the first minute of my first time listening to it, which is testament to the power of its clichés. Granted, it’s not like I had any grand expectations for a metalcore band who follows the “verb the noun” format; I’ve been around long enough to know “genericore” when I see it. But it’s still just a little bit disappointing to have my expectations met. It would be nice, for once, to be surprised by an LP that doesn’t start with the same synth build-up, that doesn’t try to make every chorus epic-as-***, or that actually possesses even the smallest amount of lyrical self-awareness. I mean, the amount of songs on here that revolve around a soaring chorus espousing some vague, teenage mantra is baffling; on the same record we get the oh-so-rebellious “no we won’t back down, we won’t back down”, the melodramatic “take me back to when this all begun”, as well as the painfully generic “they’ll never break us down, no we stand strong”, providing us with plenty of opportunities for recoiling in disgust at the unsubtle pomp Betraying The Martyrs apparently think is profound.
Picking those choice lyrics out was actually quite difficult, as all of the songs on here are largely indistinguishable from one another. As
The Resilient trudges through its fifty minute runtime, we are treated to a horrible mesh of tacky church-like orchestra, obnoxious adolescent cleans and the same riffs you’ve heard on nearly every record Sumerian has ever put out. Betraying The Martyrs seem to believe that putting a “holy” sounding synth over everything is an idea that will help them seem epic, but all it achieves is smothering everything else, removing any effect it could have ever had in the first place. It doesn’t help that it’s nearly always accompanied by either the obnoxiously earnest clean vocals or the angst-y bog-standard harsh vocals that sound the same the whole time, which are both as bad as each other. Sadly, the best parts of
The Resilient are those when Betraying The Martyrs aren’t even trying that hard, dwelling in generic metalcore that may be unspectacular and boring, but isn’t as actively offensive as when they’re going for it and failing so spectacularly. Ironically,
The Resilient therefore becomes a damning indictment of its own downfalls; resilient to change, resilient to originality.
