Review Summary: Chelsea Grin press on, complaining about the same old stuff and chugging the same old uninspiring breakdowns. Ultimately, thirty-six minutes of "same sh!t, different day".
Chelsea Grin's latest record,
My Damnation, has been about as entertaining as a one-trick horse. By "one-trick", you might think I'm referring to all the generic stuff that permeated every facet of the Utah five-piece's sound heard in
Desolation of Eden like relentless chugging, boring riffing, and the ever-present overuse of monotonous and uninspired breakdowns. Well, to be quite Frank, that's exactly what I mean by "one-trick". These kind of half-assed attempts at deathcore don't even entertain me after I get past the "this is so horrible" shock value, but I will say this about Chelsea's new album: while
My Damnation reuses the same age-old unimaginative deathcore formula (see above), a full listen through didn't give me a headache like their last album did.
My Damnation starts out in the best place for would-be listeners to get a feel for what they're gonna hear if they keep listening. "The Foolish One" is best described as a slightly faster-than-usual breakdown laden with laughably-uneducated anti-religious lyrics and chugga-chugga-choo-choo riffs. It really doesn't get much more generic than that, folks. You'll have more fun listening to a parrot sing Madonna. After the first track subsides, you'll hear more of it, except these are other tracks on the album. Watch the album while it's playing, because you never know if it's a new song unless you look at the song title. Koehler's vocals are boring at best and irritating at worst, but thankfully it's more on the boring side this time around. The drum tracks are as uninspired as ever, too, trying to keep up with the chug chug train that is the lead guitar. There's really no point in listening past the first track if you weren't impressed, because, not counting the instrumental, every track sounds exactly the same. I know some people joke about that on other deathcore reviews, but Chelsea Grin really just copy/pasted their formula over each song on the album. The only exceptions to this rule are the instrumental "Kharon" and the technical ending to "Calling in Silence". The latter of the two is short-lived but shows that some actual skill might be present in the band while the instrumental was literally just lumped into the track list. It doesn't lead into the following title track, and it doesn't really have much to do with the entire album. It sticks out as being soft and unnecessarily so. Maybe it was an attempt at adding depth, but it came across as a blatant disrespect for musical skill and it just reeked of those situations where douchebags try to seem emotional.
This album is generic to say the least. At it's best - which lasts maybe 35 seconds - it's indicative of moderate skill, but as for the rest of the album,
My Damnation spits in the face of skilfully-structured music and intelligently-written lyrics. This is something you get daily with a genre like deathcore, unfortunately, but this band makes it a musical crime is so popular yet so bad.
Recommended Track:
1.) "The Foolish One"
