Review Summary: A bizarre and confusing attempt to subvert expectations results in The Number Twelve’s worst release to date.
Howls From The Holographic Heart is a very confusing listen. Even after hearing the album multiple times, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what the creative vision was behind it. It seems as though The Number Twelve wanted to branch out into a bevy of new styles while maintaining the chaotic nature of their past releases, but the end result is nothing short of an identity crisis in musical form.
Fans of the band’s typical heavy, mathy sound won’t find much of it here.
Howls From The Holographic Heart opens and closes with its two heaviest tracks:
Trust Chaos, which is a fine, albeit erratic introduction to the record, and
Joy Is A Weapon, which starts out legitimately great before clumsily throwing a salsa break in the middle of it. The problem isn’t the salsa influence, but rather how abruptly it's introduced and discarded. It feels as though the band wanted to be quirky and experimental merely for the sake of being unpredictable.
There are moments when the band’s musical talent shines through, such as the instrumental break in
Dancing Before the Flood, but these moments are buried deep within a pile of questionable decisions and mediocrity. A perfect example of this is
False Face; the song features easily the best and most infectious chorus on the entire album, yet the verses surrounding it are haphazardly composed, featuring a jumbled mess of electronics and poorly produced vocals. For all of the song’s faults, though, at least there’s an upside to it–something that can’t be said about many of the other songs on the album.
Hard To Be Human is a straight-up pop-punk song that misses the mark entirely–not because of the genre shift, but because of its bland and uninspired execution.
Become A Ghost meanders pointlessly throughout its five-minute runtime before abruptly ending in a whimper.
Howls From The Holographic Heart isn’t a dumpster fire of an album, but it’s far and away the most inconsistent and directionless release of The Number Twelve’s career. There’s a part of me that wants to give the band praise for their ambition, but what’s the point when the end result is as middling and unremarkable as this? More often than not,
Howls From The Holographic Heart feels like a jumbled collection of conflicting ideas that should’ve been fleshed out and developed more. The willingness to experiment is undoubtedly admirable, but ambition alone can’t compensate for an inability to turn those experiments into something coherent.
2 out of 5
