Review Summary: Yet another Victory Records metalcore band releasing yet another of the most bland metalcore albums in musical history.
Picture This If You Will. A boy around the age of 13 walks out of his local music store clutching Atreyu's
Suicide Notes & Butterfly Kisses. This is a new step in his musical history being the first album he has ever purchased that features screaming as the main voice in the music (also his first perchase by a band on the Victory record label). Throughout the span of the next three years the boy continues to purchase albums from bands on the label (Darkest Hour's Undoing Ruin and Atreyu's The Curse to name a few), and grows increasingly discontent with what he is hearing. It is now 2007 and the boy (who is me for those of you who didn't catch that yet) has all but lost faith in the label's ability to sign a single band worth anybody's time (except for BtBaM of course). This album is in fact the last chance the boy is giving Victory to prove him wrong.
(The review will now switch to first person).
I figured that this time around I would pick out the least mainstream of the label's hardcore bands to choose a release from, and after a period of a half hour or so I stumbled on
Beneath The Sky. They didn't have the usual fashion of the rest of the bands on the label, which lead me to believe their sound would be somewhat different, so I figured I'd give them a chance and somehow ended up finding the band's first EP. The only way that I could think of to describe how this album feels when you listen to it as a whole is in the following manner. I ask you to do exactly as the next sentence asks before reading the rest of this review.
Read this sentence over and over again 5 or 6 times, and when you are finished you may move on.
The first time you read the sentence it probably sounded like a decent one. There are no grammatical errors, a comma is properly inserted in the middle and it promptly ends with a period. However, by the second or third time you probably got tired of reading it and also noticed its nothing special compared to the rest of the sentences in this review. This is exactly how this release feels.
Music wise it is extremely underwhelming. The guitars never break out of the chugging riffs and often follow the eact same patter throughout the
entire song. The riffs are all either open palm muted power chords throughout most of the verses with one or two other chords slightly higher on the neck, or those oh so forgetable hammer-on pull-off riffs. What makes this worse is the fact that everything is slowed down to half the spead of normal metalcore riffs leaving you wondering if they are in fact the least tallented guitarists in the genre. As for the other instruments, they all suffer from the same slowed down effect. The drums would be acceptable if they where played at a normal tempo, the bass never enters the soundscape, and the keytar (yes there is one) is absolutely devoid from the album except for the final second of one song where it plays a three note synth line. Vocally the album is craptastic. The "singer" has two pitches, annoyingly screechy, and vommiting. The clean vocals are just as bad, as they either sound extremely whiny or just plain annoyingly low pitched. There is no need to worry about the lyrics attatched to the vocals, as they are completely indecipherable. The reason being the singer's screaming sounds like it is only produced from the fact that he has an incredible amount of phlegm in his throat. If you must know about the lyrical content however I'll leave this paragraph with the first line of
7861 "7861, 7861, (vomiting noise), I saw the body, hanging from the ceiling". Cheesy Death Metal lyrics at their worst.
The band also sticks to the exact same formula for each song. Intro-verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus-end. There is never any variation at all in any of the songs so not only do they strongly resemble each other, they end sounding exactly the same. This is why I have not and will not mention any songs.
Overall this is perhaps one of the worst, if not the actuall worst piece of metalcore crap that I have had to suffer through. I could go on for days about how musically bland and devoid of any real tallent this band really is, but I believe I'll stop here.
What I suggest you do as a listener is one of two things. If you have this album you should immediately throw it out, and if you don't then pat yourself on the back and go out and buy some real metalcore like All That Remains.
Final rating
1.5 (for sheer lack of talent in all areas and the same bland metalcore formula)
