Review Summary: I guess you can't teach an old dog new tricks.
Listen, I loved Strangled as much as the next guy, it's a rare moment you get music as violently agressive as the boys put out, and it was indeed a sad day when they broke up before I had the opportunity to die in a pit of theirs on this side of the pond. Nonetheless, when I heard that the Mathes brothers, former vocalist and bassist respectively of Strangled were going to be making a new project based around dealing with the grief of their Fathers death, I was more than ready to hear what tortured emotional music the two could put out, and while I wasnt exactly expecting them to be reinventing the wheel, I wasnt expecting them to just be doing Strangled again.
Almost everything about this album is just the same old beatdown thoroughfare with good production that we've come to expect from bands like Strangled and Bodysnatcher. The riffs are a mix between slam-riffs and deathcore breakdowns, and the songs are almost entirely riff-salads interspersed with samples, creepy ambience and highpassed guitars building up to climactic breakdowns. But once you get about halfway through it starts to become dissapointing. Every song melds into the next and the whole album becomes one big chugfest.
Worst of all are the moments where the album shows genuine potential to break out of the Strangled formula, but misses the mark. S.B.C has almost blackened vibes at times, and manages to display some actual minor harmony and progression throughout, but refuses to allow itself to sit in anything too creative for too long and falls back to slam riffs again and again. Vacant has some potential as a ballad, but the outro lasts far too long and vocal performances leave alot to be desired, not to mention how markedly different and removed it is from the rest of the track list, it's like a poorly done Extortionist's Intuition Knows. Most dissapointing is the intro track, Calluses, which sets us up to expect the gutwrenching album I hear in my mind, only to be followed by the rest of Porcelain.
But once you look past the dissapointment of realising the album has nothing new to offer, there are some highlights. The Mathes brothers insane vocal work is a highlight throughout the album, delivering some of the most agressive and varied vocals we've heard from them yet, switching constantly between raw hardcore yelling and some genuinely monstrous slam vocals, with unique rhythmic choices drawing clear influence from trap metal throughout and some decently cool vocal hooks throughout, like the interchanging gutturals on Dying Light, or the off-kilter rhythmic delivery of the yelling on Canary. The lyrical work deserves some props too for exploring some new territory for the two in a new way, including among other things LGBTQ-rights, and Grief, in a genuinely poetic way at times.
By far a highlight in the tracklist too is the title-track, drawing clear inspiration from emo and poppunk to give us some unexpected musical content and decent clean singing. The mellow track under the face-melting vocals works surprisingly well. However, despite highlights and not being a poor beatdown album, Porcelain goes to show us that you apparently cannot teach an old dog new tricks. I would hope to see some more innovation in future releases, perhaps dipping the toe more into the dsbm and emo influences that show up so briefly throughout.
