Review Summary: The patient was let out too soon.
Another Sunday night. Another week’s worth of cigarettes rolled. And here I am having listened to Patient Sixty-Seven’s debut album,
Wishful Thinking, thinking to myself, “***… I am having
really bad luck finding some solid new music.”
According to their official website, Patient Sixty-Seven is a metalcore band that comes from one of the most isolated cities in the world (apparently it’s so isolated it doesn’t have a name). I tried to find out who their members were but while the website says they are a four piece, it only lists their vocalists (Tom Kiely and Rory Venville) names. Apparently their biggest claim to fame is how many streams they’ve gotten because their first EP was released in 2020, when live shows weren’t a thing.
The album is pretty standard metalcore. Riffs and breakdowns abound in standard metalcore style with the usual metalcore tandem between clean and harsh vocals. (Did I say metalcore enough there? It’s metalcore.) I’ll start with the instrumentals because they aren’t always boring. While the riffs and breakdowns are overall fairly generic there are moments through this album wherein the instrumentals suddenly start doing something interesting, such as a slam, changing the time signature a bit, adding a ghost note here or there on the snare, even a relatively decent guitar solo. The production is far from horrible but the mixing on the bass is totally inconsistent, resulting in parts which sound a tad more robust than the otherwise thin music. Unfortunately, nearly any sort of creative melody is lacking from the instrumentals, and the guitarists stick to pretty safe riffing styles. There are a couple of neat exceptions to this standard, which is what kept me going through the record, but in the end the instrumentals try so hard to be “metalcore” it’s done at the expense of any musical expression.
On a scale of bad to being shot into the sun, the vocals land somewhere around being burned alive for the most part. Okay that’s a bit mean, but in reality the vocals are what makes this album a 2.5 instead of a 3. Aside from the fact that the harsh vocalist (don’t know which one it is because of the highly informative website) sticks to pretty subpar styles most of the time, the clean vocalist is trying to play it safe throughout the whole album and ends up sounding whiny when it seems like he’s actually trying. Again it’s not
always the case, but in an album that is only thirty-five minutes, it’s damn near the whole thing.
In summary, this is totally standard, but only somewhat tolerable, metalcore. I’m not against metalcore, but it should be good. This isn’t. Thank you for visiting, Patient Sixty-Seven, but you’ll probably end up in the hospital again soon from injuries sustained trying to produce good music.
