Review Summary: ERROR: coherence.dll not found
While most bands seem to blossom into this world with open palms swaddling shard fragments and mosaic dreams, fallingwithscissors crashed through the skylight, bringing down the chandelier just to chew on glass with brilliant bloody grins in some juvenile act of defiance—destroying just to see what happens, and then destroying
again because the reaction is
fun. It's almost like the band is just trying to see how many stress fractures they can apply to their chaotic brand of electronic-infused metalcore before it collapses in on itself, and I think they might have found that breaking point.
the death and birth of an angel is an absolute mess, plain and simple. A mess that feels like it was thrown together with demolition tools and half an arm. fallingwithscissors didn't just find their breaking point here, they pranced straight over it like kids leaping the subway turnstile, leaving a trail of reckless abandon and mad laughter in their wake. It's disjointed, clunky, inefficient, ugly, I could go on. These songs show almost zero identifiable sense of structure, and are mostly held together by the violence of blood geysers rupturing under a pressure grid. It almost makes more sense to approach this EP as one long track that stumbles in and out of consciousness than trying to keep tabs on the tracklist. Even "atrophy:angel" sounds like it ends two separate times just to confusingly kick back to life and — wait... is this still the same song, or a different one? I have no clue. The occasional moment of brilliance does spring forth from the chaos, usually in the form of some zoomer techno f*ckery like the hardstyle rave outro of "(un)equivalent_exchange" or the ambient breakcore that pervades the burdened agony of "tripping > wires", but unfortunately even the most tangible moments of the EP (y'know, the moments where fallingwithscissors sound like a regular metalcore band) are hampered by a washed out and claustrophobic mix that makes the guitars and vocals sound like two sheets of sandpaper on a contact mic.
All that said,
the death and birth of an angel is as clumsy as it is enjoyable, and it's biggest flaws become its most redeeming qualities. It's that uncontrollable, haphazard spit strewn across the sidewalk type of abandon that makes this experience memorable, and whether that memory is negative or positive depends entirely on who you are. It might be an incoherent mess, but the more I listen, the more I see the intention behind it, and the more I appreciate it's purposeful abrasiveness and borderline inaccessibility. There is certainly some potential here that the band has not quite tapped into yet, but I also think whatever my idea of a "good" evolution would be might be everything the band is grinding their axe against. And who am I to stop them from destroying another chandelier?
