Review Summary: Give life to violence in absence of love.
It's fitting that
This Bitter Garden begins with a laugh track and a mime making sacrilege upon the altar. If you thought For Your Health's 2022 split with awakebutstillinbed hinted at a permanent departure from the group's disso-melodic sass into clean-sung Jimmy Eat World worship, you were (sadly, to a degree) mistaken. On their sophomore full-length, the group is continuing to flex their newfangled melodic sensibilities without abandoning their hardcore roots, and they are doing it in a fashion that is decidedly not very user-friendly (non-derogatory; picture a walmart shirt that reads "warning: does not play nice with others", or some other such comedic declaration of antisocial violence).
This Bitter Garden is wrought with a macabre sense of divine horror, both lyrically (
"They swear that He is just / the same one who sent the flood / Led Abraham to the mount to cut up his only son") and in the sadistic "we're gonna stab your eardrums with guitars because it's fun" type of way that seems at times obtuse. Do you like treble? Well, you're in luck. For Your Health
will repeatedly try to alienate you with glass rods and a brash conglomerate of musical leanings; sometimes their attempt to mix pop-punk singalongs with abrasive panic chords and swingy sasscore rhythms sounds more like standing between two festival stages than hearing a singular whole (second track "Flowers For The Worst Of Them" is particularly guilty of sounding confused), but like a bloody crime scene, it's kind of hard to look away.
The bigger picture of
This Bitter Garden may be jeeringly disorganized, but there is plenty to enjoy on a song-by-song basis. "Gaia Wept" is a personal favourite for how the band approaches evil d-beat and grind in a way that feels like a truly fresh take on punk conventions. The band also delivers with their less haphazard approach to post-hardcore with tracks like "With Empty Promises & Loaded Guns", "Clementine" and "In The Valley Of Weeping" (the latter of which is threaded with a synth arpeggio that is endearingly reminiscent of the Owl City/I Set My Friends On Fire era). Album centerpiece "Heaven Here" is a beautiful spoken word piano interlude, and the first third of "Hostel Elysia" is the closest the band comes to sounding truly mellow before exploding into power chords and atmospheric tremolo leads that eventually fade out into a cloud of more piano and synthesizer. The rest of the album, however, is almost entirely made of psychotic panic chord salad that you may struggle to find the hooks in without getting punctured, but they are there if you look close enough. "The Rotting Pear" in particular does a good job at splitting the difference by sneaking a clever melodic hook into a whole bunch of peripheral noise.
The chaos of
This Bitter Garden may rely too heavily on the diminishing shock value of panic chords and the showmanship of smashing together disparate styles for its own good, and the production certainly accentuates the jarring nature of For Your Health's songwriting, but there are some fairly inventive ideas here, as well as a plethora of mathematical musicianship to enjoy so long as you can bear the punishment. For Your Health has undoubtedly angered the Gods and ushered in our inevitable divine retribution with the needless violence of this release. Eat it with a smile on your face.
