Review Summary: Thanks, MyChildren MyBride
This just in: There’s a new MyChildren MyBride album out (!) Do you know what that means? No? Take their last offering,
Unbreakable, play through it once again if it has been a while – note: it
should have been a while – and listen to this year’s
Lost Boy. You’ll be able to vomit along to the lyrics with ease - despite not even knowing them - predict the breakdowns right down to what chord they’re in – at least half of them are in the
same chord; don’t think too hard - and cut the whole album off, like you could with
Unbreakable, once track three rolls around. By that point in
Lost Boy, you will have taken in everything the band have to offer you and more: i.e. a metalcore headache, the likes of which the most generic, derivative, and uninspired bands in this genre could give you.
Is
Lost Boy really that bad? It is when you factor in the colossal level of infuriating astonishment that you get when listening to this album. Taking the irksome guitar players and vocalist out of the equation – I’d also take the bassist out too, but, you guessed it, MyChildren MyBride pretty much already did that themselves – and you have a good band:
well, you have a good temporary drummer anyway. Patrick Snyder lends his kit to the group as a fill-in, and he is somehow able to play a competent level behind the disturbingly bad, below-par work of the others. And by playing competently, I strictly mean that: he’s the best MyChildren MyBride have going for themselves, certainly – but he’s only
average in his performance!
For the fun of the pun, where
Unbreakable was already
broken on release in 2008,
Lost Boy is already
lost once it opens up. I literally started the album on opener “Terra Firma” while searching the web – next thing I knew, six tracks had passed by in the album without my having noticed a change at all: Matthew Hasting kept the same ugly, vomit-inducing tone in his voice; guitarists Robert Bloomfield and Daniel Alvarado gave me the routine chugs and upsettingly weak melodic guitar lines; and the band tried on a number of occasions to implement these gang vocals, utterly failing every time. The problem with the MyChildren MyBride’s sing-a-longs was how cheesy and awkward they were in their implementation in the songs. When such cliché-ish lines as “
what goes around comes around” and “
we weren’t assigned for so much than this life worth living" are belted by the rest of the band behind the regurgitated mess that is Hasting’s vocal performance, you have more than one reason to cringe.
Lost Boys is like
Unbreakable two years ago: the band do nothing to diversify themselves, whether in the actual album itself or among their peers as a whole; everything is played sub-averagely; and the band just can’t seem to improve their performance – no matter how much touring they seem to do. For these reasons, I will deem this group one of the
bands, the ones who give the negative metalcore stereotypes and connotations some validity, striking a long, thick line of red ink on well over half of the genre.
Lost Boy is a title fittingly encapsulating MyChildren MyBride right now: they're stuck in the uglier confines of their genre, unwilling to move, and giving critics readily available-for-use fire starters everywhere. Thanks, guys, as if we really needed more people to hate this kind of music.
