Review Summary: Twenty-three minutes of derivative and uninspired hardcore. Thankfully it’s not longer.
Hardcore music – despite being incredibly varied as a genre – typically has a few things in common: the songs are high energy, the albums are usually shorter in length than average, and the singers sound pissed off. Lionheart’s newest release,
Valley of Death II, checks all three of these boxes, yet the album consistently falls flat and fails to engage the listener, which serves as a reminder that a hardcore release needs more than just these standard features in order to stand out amongst other artists in the genre. So what exactly went wrong? For starters, the lyrics immediately reveal themselves as laughably cringe-worthy at worst, and uninspired at best. Be that as it may, hardcore music isn’t often solely judged for lyrical content. But there are moments within
Valley of Death II that are distractingly stupid and overindulge in wannabe “tough guy” energy. Case in point: The countless references to dogs throughout the album. There is literal barking in the chorus of
Chewing Through the Leash, as well as numerous repeats of the lyric “where my dogs at” in the aptly named
Roll Call, and lastly, you could probably guess what the song
Release the Dogs is about.
I can overlook a hardcore album’s lame lyrical content if the instrumentals are at least captivating enough on their own. However,
Valley of Death II’s riffs are painfully stale, and the breakdowns in particular are yawn-inducing and are recycled multiple times throughout the album. Simply put, there’s just nothing about
Valley of Death II to make it stand out in any meaningful way. That’s not to say that the whole thing is offensively bad, as there are impressive moments that briefly surface from time-to-time, such as the bouncy groove during the chorus of the album’s title track, or the entirety of
No Peace. It’s also worth pointing out that (apparently) A Day to Remember features on the album’s closer…but their presence on the track is effectively invisible. If you need a new hardcore album to put on while you drive to work or go to the gym, you can (pretty easily) find something better and more memorable than this.
2 out of 5
