Review Summary: Afterparty crasher.
A Wilhelm Scream seemed poised for a strong comeback in 2022 with
Lose Your Delusion, their first album in nine years. The singles were incredibly promising; lead cut “Be One To No One” seemingly packed in enough riffs and gang chants to make their Massachusetts peers in Four Year Strong scowl with jealousy. Subsequent “GIMMETHESHAKES” and “Figure Eights In My Head” also showcased equal parts aggression and restraint. Nuno and Trevor’s vocals were assured and oozed character, and all the ingredients were seemingly in place to make their long-awaited follow-up to
Partycrasher a successful one. While I’d hesitate to call it a disappointment,
Delusion was too scatterbrained and lacking direction – the Dragonforce-goes-skate-punk shenanigans of “Yo Canada” was a clear non-single stand-out, whereas the likes of “Apocalypse Porn” and “I’m Gonna Work It Out” felt like they had nothing to say in the bloated tracklist.
With
Cheap Heat it’s almost like history repeating itself. The singles are uniformly stellar: “Let It Ride” could very well be the strongest two-minutes-and-fifteen seconds worth of blistering, metallic punk rock AWS has ever penned whereas “Tunnel Vision” employs one of the band’s catchiest choruses to date (its opening sentiments about
“Like the internet said you better know your worth” is an absolute earworm), as does “Midnight Ghost”. The rest of the album, however, flip-flops a bit in quality, mainly stemming from the fact that
Cheap Heat is rather one-note in its delivery. Virtually every song leans on the same formula: punishing D-beats under Reilly’s and newcomer Murray’s relentless shredding. Opener “Somebody’s Gonna Die” sets the tone with an ominous riff build-up that explodes into an anthemic chorus, and from there the band never really takes their foot off the pedal – for better or worse. Closer “Poison II” is just about the only track that showcases some semblance of restraint and temperance and by then, a lot of the album's strongest moments have already been served. In all,
Cheap Heat is incredibly effective during its brightest spots but has little to say elsewhere, making its 30 minute runtime enjoyable without being too memorable.
