Review Summary: The most unpleasant and lazily made music to ever grace your ears.
For those lucky ones who aren't familiar with this band, Traitors is a beatdown/deathcore band from Florida, and The Hate Campaign is their first full release. As a Florida local myself, I was interested in checking out the local scene, and that's how I stumbled upon these guys. Now onto the music...
Let's start with how the guitars on this album sound. The tone these guitars are tuned to are so unbearable, it sounds so edited and produced to the point where it doesn't even sound like a guitar, it just sounds like a mess of sound. To make it even worse, they hardly even play their guitars. Every note on this album sounds exactly the same, they could of possibly mixed in a few different tabs here and there, but you wouldn't be able to tell due to the atrocious production.
Now on to the bass in the album. Oh who am I kidding here, the bass isn't even present on at all throughout the whole album. I've sat through this abysmal album so many times just to find a trace of bass, but I always come up empty handed.
The drums on here sound so flat and boring, it's like the drummer here is lightly tapping his drums with pencils. They're so stale and add nothing to the mix whatsoever. It just feels like the drummer was half asleep recording all the drum tracks.
Every three songs or so, there's always a little interlude of just the sounds of rioting, which might be an alright intro to the album for about 30 seconds, setting the mood and tone of the record, but no, they beat the rioting sounds thing to death as if it's a dead horse. They're just so tedious, having to sit through a whole minute and a half (about 5 minutes in total of uninteresting riot sounds) just feels like a chore. I would say spreading them out a little bit is a good thing, but then you realize that their music fills those gaps and it turns into less of a good thing.
The vocals on this album are probably the most appalling thing on here. Tyler Sheldon is not a good vocalist by any means, you can tell how hard he's trying to force out a guttural and a growl, and the production on his voice just makes it even worse. Imagine a decent deathcore vocalist, like Phil Bozeman or Vincent Bennett for example. Now imagine them trying to growl while giving birth, that's how all the vocals on here feel. You can just feel this poor dude strain his voice, you know he won't be doing this for too much longer.
All in all, it would be in your best interest to stay away from this album. It's a sloppy mess of generic deathcore trying to be "slow and crushing", when just in fact, they're just being lazier than usual. A dreadful attempt at something heavy, just gone horribly wrong.
