Review Summary: If you’re incredibly sick after a night of binge drinking, and need to regurgitate the two day old pizza and Taco Bell in your stomach to feel better, listening to Bring Me The Horizon’s Count Your Blessings will do more to make you vomit than stickin
If you’re looking for a normal review of this album, then just look at my summary, and you’ll know my thoughts on it. How this band got popular, let alone a record deal, is shocking to me. Everyone either despises this album as much as they despise Adolf Hitler, or they love it to death, and I am convinced that the latter group of people is suffering permanent mental brain damage.
It’s not to hard understand why this band is despised in the metal community. Their image looks more appropriate for a Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance tour than Slayer or Megadeth. The band members are clones of frontman Oliver Sykes, the lyrics are the biggest bland bull*** found in a copy of your sister’s Seventeen magazine, and the instruments sound like they were playing underwater. I was introduced to this band when one of my friends asked me if I liked Death Metal. He then told me to listen to Count Your Blessings, and after listening to the title track, I threw a brick in his face and tossed his CD in my fireplace.
A Year later, I thought to myself “Remember that terrible CD you tossed into a fireplace? You should do a review of it.” Of course, I don’t own a copy of Bring Me The Horizon’s first full length abomination of music, and my only recourse was to look up each song individually on youtube. If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t have been able to differentiate the songs from one another. After listening to all 10 tracks, including the bonus hot topic track, I went to the nearest liquor store and bought 3 liters of the cheapest vodka and drank heavily, trying to kill the brain cells that stored the memories of those god-awful 11 tracks. Unfortunately, my efforts failed.
The first track has some promise with some fast drumming, though you can instantly tell that something went wrong during the production of this album. The guitars and drums sound muffled, the bass is either non-existent, or they pulled a Metallica and edited it out, and only the vocals are sharp in production value (and this isn’t a good thing). The blood-curdling screech emitted from Oli Sykes is the indicator that things are just going to get bad from here.
Now, this is all a matter of opinion, but I, for one, do not like high pitched screeching such as Angela Gossow’s or Alexi Laiho’s voices, and it doesn’t help that this album is completely full of this garbage. The album would actually improve if the vocals were muffled, or hell, if they were removed completely. As I said, however, this is all matter of opinion. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who enjoy screeching vocals that make kittens want to commit vehicular suicide, and if you are one of those, this album is for you.
I guess a good thing about the vocals is that Oliver Sykes screeches them in such a way that makes the lyrics nearly incomprehensible. Trust me, after looking up some of the lyrics in this album, you’d be better off not know what the hell he’s screeching about. I, however, need to know that the lead singer isn’t advocating the Holocaust or screaming about mutilating pregnant women with a pair of pliers while drinking a diarrhea milkshake, so I look up lyrics. To be frank, Count Your Blessings has some of the most uninspired, unoriginal, uncreative lyrics in the history of music. With an aura so emo, you might actually think they were originally an emo band, Bring Me the Horizon assaults your ears with hardcore lyrics such as:
“You got a mouth like a razor blade. It cuts so deep
So kiss my wrists my neck and give me eternal sleep”
-From Tell Slater not to Wash His Dick
and:
“She starts her new diet of liquor and dick,
Just like Hollywood, but laced in sick,
The sun goes down, and so does she”
-From Pray for Plagues
Most of the lyrics deal with misogyny, suicide, or getting drunk at parties. In fact, I actually think BMTH was an emo band before turning to deathcore. I imagine them sitting in the recording studio when Oli Sykes walks in shouting, “Hey, guys, wait a second. I just read on myspace that Job For A Cowboy got a record deal from playing Deathcore. We should do that, too!”
Someone from the rest of the band: “But, you already wrote the lyrics to all of the songs, and we were just about to finish up the saxophone solo, or whatever they do in emo songs.”
Oli Sykes: “Forget that. We’re playing deathcore now. Just play really fast, put some breakdowns in every song because those are cool, and don’t worry about the lyrics. They’ll work.”
Basically, all the songs are the same. Fast riffs that are boring and uninspired, boring drum patterns, breakdowns every minute, and screeching vocals that make you want to put your head in an oven. If I hadn’t looked at the titles of the songs on youtube, I would not know the difference between Braille and Liquor and Love lost. It’s not like listening to Rust In Peace where the songs are actually different. I’ll give a quick word about breakdowns: they suck. Not just these boring Bring Me Scene Music breakdowns, but all breakdowns. One is too many, but BMTH apparently doesn’t agree with me, sometimes putting 3 in one damn song. Jesus, guys, give us a break. Breakdowns suck, end of story.
So, is there anything good about this album? Well, to give us a break from the horrid lyrics and vomit-inducing vocals, the band had the courtesy to put two instrumentals in the album. One is actually quite good. The other is the same putrid diarrhea mush prevalent throughout the album. “Slow Dance” isn’t very slow at all. As if padding their regular songs with repeated vocals wasn’t bad enough, they decided to pad this instrumental with a ***ing breakdown. Are you kidding me? Aren’t instrumentals supposed to…I don’t know….show off the instruments? While there is some use of guitar, putting a breakdown in an instrument is counter-productive. It tells me the other members of the band couldn’t come up with a good solo, so they put a stupid, bland breakdown. Garbage.
The second instrumental, Fifteen Fathoms, is much better. A softer song, it’s a welcome change from the screeching vocals and watered-down guitars. Unfortunately, it is so far down the track list, by the time I got to it, listening to a cat meowing for three minutes would have been a welcome change. After Fifteen Fathoms, we get another diarrhea mess of anal juice, and a cover of Slipknot. A cover of a Slipknot song. A…Cover….of a Slipknot…song. Who said this band is death metal, and where do they live?
I could keep going, but there’s no point anymore. The whole album sucks. There’s like one good song, and it’s too damn short. There’s also a good solo in Black and Blue, or is it Liquor and Love Lost? I don’t know. Somewhere in this quagmire of anal abominations is a good solo. You might find it, or you might find your will to live diminishing after listening to the first 2 tracks. I’m not going to recommend this garbage to anyone, unless you’ve captured a terrorism suspect and need to know where Osama Bin Laden is located. Don’t listen to it. Don’t let your friends listen to it. Don’t let anyone listen to it.
