Review Summary: A dumb, clichéd, ridiculous, groan-inducing good time.
Heaven Is Only In Our Dreams, the debut effort from The Measure, is about as corny as you can get when it comes to a metalcore album. Underneath the nostalgia-driven aesthetic, every modern-day trope is not only present but exploited as far as it can go, making it about as creatively mundane as a stick figure. Fortunately, I don’t always need metalcore albums to be masterpieces of originality in order to slap—and
Heaven Is Only In Our Dreams actually kind of slaps. What The Measure may lack in an artistic vision, they make up for in head-banging fun. Despite every inclination to deride the album I found my head bopping and a stupid grin on my face too many times to count, whimsically reminiscing on my teenage taste in music. It riffs, it chugs, and it goes at a mile a minute—making for an album that (despite its many flagrant clichés) is unexpectedly lean and to the point. Combined with tight instrumentals and a relatively competent vocal performance,
Heaven Is Only In Our Dreams is a perfectly serviceable metalcore record. So yeah, this album definitely ain’t "it"—but in all honesty, who gives a sh*t? It’s a lot of fun in a stupid, heartfelt, unabashed kind of way, and that's totally fine.
