Review Summary: “We’re not going to do an album again, maybe ever. We’re thinking about doing shorter records” - Oli Sykes, Nov. 2019
Bring Me The Horizon are art criminals and should be banned from your local supermarket effective immediately.
Their new not-an-album sees them step up to a level frequently but inconclusively hinted at by their past work: whatever craft they uphold as musicians has finally been surpassed by their craft as attention-grabbing bait artists. This is not a bad thing;
Amo and
That’s The Spirit saw the group plumbing musical depths just fine while treating things in earnest, so it’s honestly a little refreshing to see (and, to a lesser degree, hear) them cultivate an active sense of edge and creative volatility as openly as they do here. Everything about this release’s premise, release, branding and genre has a stark, desperate scope that seems to scream out at every available opportunity
are you not entertained?
Credit where it’s due, I was gripped:
Music to listen to~dance to~blaze to~pray to~feed to~sleep to~talk to~grind to~trip to~breathe to~help to~hurt to~scroll to~roll to~love to~hate to~learn Too~plot to~play to~be to~feel to~breed to~sweat to~dream to~hide to~live to~die to~GO TO (henceforth somewhat disingenuously abbreviated to
Music) - let's try that again:
Music is a mix of pop, hip-hop and R&B, pulled off with songwriting chops that likely correspond to the lowest expectations you might have for an ex-metal, ex-pop metal band of this calibre trying their hand at such things. It’s the equivalent of hearing a 13-year old discover he can write a riff that sounds *almost* the same as Smoke on the Water, before promptly channelling his excitement into a half-hour jam session that consists entirely of that one riff. The only difference here is its set of digitalised beats, synth palettes and vocal stylings - listen through the first track’s blissfully green attempt at a longform hip-hop jam and tell me I’m wrong.
In spite of this, I never once felt a need to use the skip button throughout
Music’s playtime. It feels concertedly half-baked, sure, but the band pull it off as chaos in slow motion, a new bemusement around every corner. The more egregious each song’s protraction, the more entertaining. None of their ideas are individually interesting or well-executed, but they still manage to structure and frame them to seem far more engaging than the sum of their parts: this, in my book, is something to be commended without a hint of irony. Good bait.
There is no better example of this than the album’s fifth track, a gargantuan mess that will both confirm and make you question everything you know about Bring Me The Horizon. Things start off relatively convincingly thanks to BEXEY’s feature (a merciful break from Sykes’ embarrassing hip-hop antics), but quickly spiral down a directionless rabbithole. Once becomes apparent to all involved, the band drop an impromptu nu-metal dronestrike because, y’know, artistry …and then the song flips. Remember how this band are fully-fledged shitpost artists now? Well, here they give us eighteen straight minutes of the same unwavering four-bar glitch, over which Sykes treats us to an impromptu podcast episode. It’s as full of asinine 420-isms as anything you’ll hear, touching on hypnotism, vegetarianism and sixth sense-ism, but in its most affecting moments Sykes consciously reduces himself to his own Troubled, Talentless And Passionate trope in a way that honestly took me aback. The lines between personal and persona are naturally blurred tae oblivion, but this section is uncomfortable and affecting on a level that the rest of the album doesn’t come close to reaching; as a heart-on-sleeve soul baring you can make your own mind up on this part, but as a subversive gesture it smacks of enough raw audacity to merit at least a begrudging “fair shit” nod. The score overhead is still a firm 1, and we don’t talk about the other parts of the monologue.
We will, however, talk about the music.
“The electronic elements sound no better than something your average high schooler with an Ableton 30 day free trial is uploading to SoundCloud.”
When Sputnik’s own Trebor. wrote this for
Amo it read as a fun no-smoke-without-fire exaggeration. Applied here, it scans as the literal truth. So many moments here strike me as flat-out amateurish either in their endlessly recycled composition or their production value. The seventh track, for example, is so protracted and immemorable in its paucity of laconic R&Bisms that it might as well have come out of a songwriting algorithm. It takes until the eight-minute mark to shatter this illusion, at which point Sykes drops a spoken word appearance reminding us that dolphins are sentient creatures (spoiler alert: it takes him two minutes to conclude as such).
Some of the audio engineering here is also farcically incompetent, something that never struck me in the same way about Bring Me The Horizon’s other non-metal output. 3:23 on track three, for instance, is perhaps the most clunky digital fade-up I have heard from any professional artist; the speed and crudeness with which the arrangement near-instantly changes volume is a craftless reminder of how artificial its dynamics were to begin with. Or take the jangly piano in the second track’s bridge - this section works pretty well structurally, but the piano is performed so lifelessly by the band’s third most useful roadie’s spare MacBook that you can be forgiven for questioning whether they still have a roster of actual musicians. If Jordan Fish is going to exercise this much creative control over the band, you’d think he’d step his game up: note velocity and reverb are both important functions of MIDI-driven bedroom projects, and people engage with them them for a reason. If Bring Me The Horizon can’t even keep up with the insomniac kids of Bandcamp, I’m not sure who they’re hoping to compete with. We could go on, but I feel there’s already enough dead fish and buckshot in this release’s barrel.
Taking a small step back, ’professional’ is an important word here.
Music’s very existence is arresting and interesting in a way that could only have arisen from what feels like a deliberate misuse of platform. I don’t want to pontificate on how professional artists should and should not act, but much of the appeal here comes from how fascinatingly
cheap almost every decision undertaken here seems. If an underground artist had dropped a release like this, it would have been consigned to the depths of the internet and no-one, quite rightly, would have cared a jot. It’s so cheap that it feels arguably even cheaper to call it out as such; there’s no joy to be taken in waving pitchforks at Oli Sykes when the man himself steps up as the star player in his own flagellation squad. He sounds like he needs a hug, a cup of tea and a firm artistic direction; I hope all three can be procured once he’s clocked that clickbait does not make for a fulfilling career path. Bring Me The Horizon fought hard to pull their career into commercial success; if the best they’ve got for us at this point is wide-eyed, dubiously candid self-sabotage, then I’m along for the ride but it’s genuinely a little disheartening to see a group this scrambled playing a lowest common denominator game of attention seeking like this.
