Review Summary: Don't ask questions. Just consume product, and then get excited for next products.
After the release of
Technology in 2018, you could say I’ve kept my eye on Don Broco ever since. This isn’t because I loved
Technology; on the contrary, the Bedford four-piece’s third album is an incredibly volatile and bloated record that has more failures than successes, but it did have some genuinely great stuff nestled in there that warranted following future releases. However, the top and bottom of it is that I’ve had conflicting emotions with Don Broco’s jarring sonic canvas, for lack of a better term. Their entire career has followed this kind of capricious formula where you have to sieve through a weird hodgepodge of ideas, sometimes ones that are outright egregious and hideous to listen to, but eventually stumble upon a barnstorming banger like “Yen” or “You Got it Girl”. Credit where it’s due, mind, Don Broco have a sound that’s supremely distinct and hard to predict, but the persistent caveat from that is their entire career is wrought by inconsistency.
Albums like
Priorities and
Technology have some genuinely excellent tracks in them, but the experience overall is blotchy at best and totally incoherent at worst. As such, the band’s discography has their best songs screaming under the weight of the many experiments that don’t work so well – be it an annoyingly repetitious melody or hook, a humorous but oddly out of place lyric, or a bizarrely capricious shift in tone and style that dismantles any potential a song might have had. Fortunately,
Amazing Things largely rectifies the aforementioned detrimental proclivities and is easily the most consistent record of their entire career, with a firm handling on tone, vision, and flow, for the most part. The band’s juxtaposition of humour and, at times, Zappa-tinged flourishes over tight grooves, big riffs and grandiose synths showcased a band understanding where their true potential lies. The question was, could they continue to refine what worked so well for
Amazing Things and tailor it for future releases?
At the time, when
Nightmare Tripping’s first single landed last year, “Cellophane” looked like an open admission to finally understanding what needed to be done. It’s a bombastic NU-metal anthem with a scratchy guitar riff synergising with a juiced-up, syncopated rhythm section, with lyrics, melodies, and vocal approaches all perfectly accommodating the vibe of the track. However, its succeeding singles disappointingly slotted back into their old habits, leaving a precarious aura around
Nightmare Tripping rather than being the shoo-in it initially presented with “Cellophane”. The end result isn’t the worst album of their career, but it’s the most disingenuous and nowhere near as good as
Amazing Things. This is largely down to the fact that, disappointingly, the dreaded volatility and lack of cohesive vision rear their ugly heads again, giving the impression they got cold feet plunging into metal wholesale, instead opting for a superficial coat of TikTok-approved heaviness so’s not to alienate anyone in the process. And I’ll be honest, it’s pretty frustrating.
I’ll concede that
Nightmare Tripping at least tries to maintain some semblance of tonal consistency and is a “heavy” record for the most part. There are plenty of distorted riffs and key parts that you expect from heavy music, the problem is that it all feels curated for tourists and comes off, almost insufferably, inauthentic. I’m far from being a gatekeeper and throughout my entire life have always advocated for experimentation in music rather than parochial pockets for musicians to reside in, but there’s a pattern bands are taking these days when implementing metal into their sound, and it feels more like these elements are used as a sideshow or gimmick, rather than giving it the reverence it rightfully deserves. It’s that feeling you get when a normie who listens to the radio top 100 walks into a room full of metal heads and busts out the horns while headbanging for a few seconds before laughing it off.
It’s funny because in hindsight, one thing that felt off to me was the breakdown in “Cellophane” – even at the time it felt extremely off and generic, but I shrugged it off as it was in the confines of a single and the rest of the song was fun, however, when you put it in the context of the record, there are a few moments like this that undermine what the band is trying to do here. “Pacify Me” has sporadic moments where Rob does these hilariously bad screams after a buckshot of sounds from their earlier years, topped off with moments where these girthy chugging guitars enter the fray. There’s the factory-settings metal sound of “True Believers” guested with Sam Carter, which, considering where Architects have ended up should come as no surprise, as well as the breakdown in the title track “Nightmare Tripping”. In terms of the heaviness in these songs, there’s nothing here that feels smoothly integrated with everything else, and worse still, it’s not done in an interesting way, at least for the first two tracks mentioned. Notwithstanding “Nightmare Tripping” doesn’t get off so easy either, because this particular track is the subject of all the band’s strengths and weaknesses in one song. While I love the fact Nickelback is featured on this song (this is the start of their redemption arc after decades of being dunked on, watch this space), the track is essentially three separate songs being stitched together like a pair of Kurt Cobain’s jeans. One part is a brand of surface-level heaviness mentioned earlier, one part is catchy buttrock, and the final part is a vestige of
Automatic era songwriting. All three parts have potential to be something decent, but instead of picking one lane to focus on, everyone loses out and we get the kind of whiplash synonymous with their first three albums.
I’ve mentioned this in the past, but there’s a lot of music out there now that’s specifically made so bands can use “that part of a song” as a means to curate scripted moments in a live setting. While there’s nothing particularly wrong with that, it’s a machination that’s damaging both the organic grassroots energy of a live show – where the fans decide what’s a great moment in a song and they create the unique, unpredictable moments – and the album experience itself, as it makes the act of listening to it painfully predictable. Unfortunately for
Nightmare Tripping, that’s precisely what it’s riddled with: add a little System of a Down worship here, a little Limp Bizkit there, a bit of that Bad Omens baddiecore sound for TikTok videos, a sprinkling of generic breakdowns and stock metal guitar tones and you have the same recipe a lot of mainstream acts are running with at the minute. However, when you consider that Don Broco are shoehorning this into a pre-existingly scattered sound anyway, the results are pretty mournful. Is
Nightmare Tripping a bad album? No. With the exception of “Swimming Pools” for being outright unlistenable, due to its irritating hooks and melodies, and “The Corner” for being a disastrously ennui closer, the rest of the record is serviceable in what it does. It’s the usual boilerplate product we get in the age of streaming, and it should please people for a week before the next slew of products hits consumers’ ears.
