Review Summary: Are you happy now?
"We only ever love you when you're seeing red", Carter hisses in the penultimate track of
The Sky, the Earth & All Between. It’s a scenario as old as time and one that makes me shudder with embarrassment every time it happens. To the surprise of no one, since Architects are always two steps behind what Bring Me the Horizon are doing, BMTH went through a similar thing with their fanbase when
That’s the Spirit came out, eventually clapping back with their 2019 album,
Amo, where Oli calls out the band’s detractors during “heavy metal”. While I think
Amo is one of the best albums they’ve ever produced, I’m not particularly fond of bands lashing out at their fanbase when they have criticisms for the direction they’re going in. It’s not to say bands shouldn’t do what they want creatively, more that it’s a commentary on how ugly it looks when you see them punching down at an audience that has supported them for years. The funny thing is, when BMTH did this, they had a legitimately exciting, forward-thinking record to back up their witty snipe. For Architects, it’s a different matter.
Before I get into that, I want to preface everything that has led to this point. Despite the contentious response that came from Architects’ last two albums, I feel my stance on those albums was pretty fair at the time, remaining largely unchanged even today. While their apodictic machinations for broader appeal were an easy spot for fans, who rightfully called it out, I feel like they did a serviceable job in execution, despite some obvious shortcomings. Yet even with my sympathetic view on
For Those That Wish to Exist and
The Classic Symptoms of a Broken Spirit, I can acknowledge where the criticisms are coming from, because they do feel like they’re missing core components of what made their sound entertaining in the first place. For Architects though, they took it pretty hard at the time, shifting course with a
slightly heavier follow-up to
For Those That Wish to Exist and now almost fully capitulating to the mob on their latest record,
The Sky, the Earth & All Between. Architects’ plight is that they want to continue with the sound they’ve been messing with these past four years, while placating a mob that has been pecking their heads the entire time. As such,
The Sky, the Earth & All Between clenches its fists and grits its teeth as it pummels you into the ground with overproduced guitars and drums, and Carter embracing the guttural screams fans have been crying out for. Yet, with the excessive internet-meme-heavy sound there to disorientate your senses, it hopes you don’t notice the elements cradled from their last two records. The issue is that while Architects are being as heavy as they can be, it all feels pretty hollow.
Of course, I’m not saying this is a terrible album; like their previous records, I get the same endorphin release you’d get from fast-food. When you’re actually listening to it it’s fun, but when you move away from it you can see there’s not much substance in it. During their singles cycle, I was really digging “Curse” and “Whiplash” at the time, crediting their pithy songwiriting which balanced the new sound with their old. However, about a month ago I put on
All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us for the first time in years and had a pretty severe case of whiplash when I realised how much the band had watered down their sound. I was taken aback by the quality of that record: within the opening seconds of “Nihilist”, it got me thinking about what the band have lost in the last half-a-decade. At this point
For Those That Wish to Exist,
The Classic Symptoms of a Broken Spirit and
The Sky, the Earth & All Between feel like a trilogy, because they all correlate with each other and have the same goals, with the exception of this album’s perfidious attempts at masking it. Indeed, I find them fun to listen to, but when you compare them to
All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us, it’s clear these albums are lacking in something
All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us is bursting at the seams with: Sincerity. There’s a blistering venom in Carter’s vocals that is essentially non-existent today, complex and varied songwriting, the lyrics feel impactful and have depth and an existentialistic theme underpinning them, and the production feels well-produced enough to match the nihilistic vibes the LP is running with, but it’s not detrimentally overdone.
In comparison,
The Sky, the Earth & All Between is vapid and has some, at times, cringe lyric writing (see “Judgement Day”, “Brain Dead”, “Landmines” and “Chandelier”), as well as some of the most predictable songwriting in modern metal. Modern Architects’ obstinate and myopic disposition rigidly follows the heavy-verse-melodious-chorus to the point of being eye rolling, and it’s pertinent to every heavy song on here, making them feel homogeneous. The band knew which songs would turn heads, which is why the singles are the strongest on the album. The rest of the record, with the exception of “Elegy”, is filled with the usual generic pop-metal slop Architects and their peers have been flogging since
That’s the Spirit. “Brain Dead” flies close to “Spit the Bone” for its insufferable punk edge, “Evil Eyes” is shameless Deftones worship, and the likes of “Landmines”, “Judgement Day”, “Broken Mirror” and “Chandelier” are all boilerplate sugary electro-metal tunes you’ve heard a million times before. It’s a shame really, because if the band had embraced the overindulgent, almost ironic metal sound “Elegy”, “Whiplash”, “Blackhole”, “Curse” and “Seeing Red” goes for, this could have at least broken away from the mundanity their work has suffered from in recent years. As I say,
The Sky, the Earth & All Between is fine, though I would say this is the worst of the three records. While the highs here are bigger than on the previous two, it’s a much more inconsistent album that has a lot more lows.
