Review Summary: Society went from Tull to this? Wow, I might as well kill Myself so I can stop Myself from seeing all this dickered new music.
In 2007, [L]Jethro Tull[L] had pretty much stopped making music forever, so My heart was already hurting. It seemed that the heroes of yesterday were slowly leaving Me, with [L]Peter Gabriel[L] beginning to lose originality and [L]Radiohead[L] becoming some sort of German Electronica. I found myself frequently searching for more new music that could possibly ease my slowly breaking heart.
Then one morning I discovered Design The Skyline.
This is where your beloved aqualung begins his review friends, and it isn't pretty. I'm gonna do this thing track by track, so let's get this show on the road. The members of DtS were obviously too impaired to put their music onto mediafire for me to download (I'm rather poor), and the same goes for any blogs that might usually post music online. I had only one choice left, and that was youtube. Now the thing about youtube is that most people have to downgrade the quality of the music. Now, I'm no stranger to lo-fi, as My enjoyment of [L]Rest[L] will no doubt let you all know, but this is just attrocious. The first track for Me to look up was called 'Party In The Stars'
'Party In The Stars' starts off with some tapping, sounds like the Pencils these guys should be pushing whilst failing a Math Exam or writing up a doctors note as to why they're skipping class. Soon after, a guitar comes in doing this 'Duh Duh Duh' thing. Now, I'm not an expert, but it seems to Me that they were ripping off the first track of 'Aqualung' with this one. Anyways, after the 'Duh Duh Duh' we get some bass guitar and some of those newfangled 'Deathcore' vocals that, in this case and probably all cases, severely needed to be either double tracked or simply turned up in the mix. Like what the hell? Tull got it right like 40 years earlier, so why the hell couldn't they? This probably had more budget than Aqualung and it feels like they already ruined it! Oh well, back to the track. We get some chugging and some high pitched vocals, you know, standard stuff. The song slows down in this weird time warp esque thing, I believe they call it a 'breakdown'. Now, this is something I liked about this song, they actually implemented something that Jethro Tull had created and mastered years before. Listening to this song left me shaken but willing to keep going, after all, even Tull had their bad moments, right?
Right?
Next up was 'Fox In A Box'. I'm just gonna start by saying that I don't know how you could get a fox to sit inside a box without either pissing itself or gnawing your hand off. It must be pretty hard to do, but judging from the 'ppliances the members of DtS are rocking, they must have killed the fox and used its fur for head wear. The song starts off with drums, yet again, but these drums are more akin to the beat used in Phil Collin's epic classic 'In The Air Tonight'. After that it all goes to hell. I don't exactly know how to describe what happened next, but it was a cacophony to say the least. The guitars sound as if they were just being hit or bludgeoned with a hammer, perhaps even stroked seductively while watching Genesis music videos. I believe that this style of music is supposed to be called 'Mathcore', but I failed Mathcore in grade nine so I don't know what algorithms they're supposed to be playing here, so maybe I shouldn't comment. Listening to this song made me wonder what they were saying, but it looks like nobody cared enough to post lyrics. As the song progresses it slows down and speeds up and ungodly levels, and halfway through you hear a bong being used, sheep making 'Baa' sounds, and my screams as to why I wasn't present to hit up the old bong with these foxheaded fellows. During this section the guitar makes some dickered sounds that remind me of a circus. After that the song goes back on it's tangent and makes me really wish I was listening to Tull. After that comes a two second acoustic break and some very attractive sounding Synthesizer. Programmed drums come in too, as if they wanted to for some reason switch to making a coherent beat.
The Third track is called 'Ghastly Panic' and when I heard it I thought instantly that it was an improvement. It starts off with a synthesizer, or maybe it's a Dick Hymanesque Moog doing a sweep. Anyways, that thing starts it up and I'm instantly reminded of Pink Floyd's dark side of the moon, only a much poorly produced, completely different sounding version that was made by stoned 80's Glam Metal rockers. After that it takes a similar route to the previous song, the guitars are so dinked here that it's not even funny. After that they all shout 'You know why I ***ing hate you' at the top of their lungs. That's really all I can say about it besides the fact that these young men should have their mouths washed out with soap and told to go listen to REAL music, like Jethro Tull. Even the christmas album beats this thing into the ground.
The following track is called 'Ugly Ugly Dinosaur'. I wonder if DtS knew dinosaurs had feathers....meh, anyways, the track starts off with a sad sounding moog track being looped very poorly (I can hear where it cuts off, they did nothing to mask it. I'm kind of an audiophile.) followed by more of that deathcore/mathcore/applecore bull that was in the previous songs. These guys don't vary anything at all. They can't just calm down. It's obscene. You'd think that since they smoke weed (or jenkem) that they'd be able to do some Anderson like cleans, but no, they barely even did that. When they DO use cleans here, they're put through some sort of walkie talkie distortion device that pisses me off. I still can't understand what the hell they're supposed to be saying. This was of course, the longest track on the album.
The final track was called 'Swirly Time', perhaps hearkening back to the times before they had dead foxes on their heads and got swirly's. I bet they had dreadlocks. Anyways, this song isn't different at all. It was derivative, almost like they were ripping themselves off in the same album. The only thing that made me happy about this song was that the album is over. The only other difference I can really think of are a few pig squeals and gutterals among the yelling, shouting mess.
I'm going to recoomend you some better albums here, hang on.
