Review Summary: An experiment that proves where the soul of an album lies.
There once was a land known as MySpace. It was a complete game changer for underground music, giving artists a platform to spread their music across the world to a younger generation hungry for the next big thing far away from the radio. No genre exemplifies that power better than deathcore. The genre existed beforehand in more primitive forms, but its sound was far from uniform. It was truly the Wild West, with bands throwing every conceivable metal subgenre into a blender with metalcore and death metal to create some truly unholy concoctions. One wing drew heavily from mathcore and traditional hardcore, another leaned into brutal death metal, while a third movement embraced melodic death metal. All were completely different, innovative takes on the burgeoning genre, fighting to become its dominant sound. It was a genre forged in the parents' basements of teenagers throwing everything at the wall, for better or worse.
Bring Me The Horizon were the perfect poster child for the MySpace deathcore movement. They embodied nearly everything that made the sound connect with so many people, and having charismatic Oli Sykes as a frontman certainly didn't hurt. Their first EP showcased the mathy tendencies that permeated so much of the early broader core scene with unhinged ferocity, but when
Count Your Blessings dropped, everyone took notice. The band went all in on melodic death metal riffs paired with slow-paced, downtuned chugs, callouts, gang vocals, immature youthful lyrics, and memorable breakdowns. “The sun goes down and so does she” is the deathcore line in all its crass juvenile beauty. It's a style many affectionately describe as "
Slaughter of the Soul with breakdowns." One of my favorite metal albums chopped and screwed for the youths, I couldn’t get enough of it.
Count Your Blessings was far from perfect, but it possessed that unexplainable X-factor you simply recognize the moment you hear it. It was raw, unfiltered, gnarly, imperfect, and at times sloppy, yet it was undeniably iconic just the way it was.
For a while, remasters were all the rage in music: slap a new mix on an older album and call it a day. To be fair, plenty of albums genuinely benefit from the treatment, but the remaster craze eventually spread to just about everything. Now remakes are the latest trend, which is at least more interesting by their very nature. Even so, bands keep revisiting albums that were already great on their own. Sorry, August Burns Red, I've already got the original
Thrill Seeker. You haven't changed that much. When Bring Me The Horizon announced a remake of
Count Your Blessings, my eyebrows raised and my stomach slightly turned. This was a style of heavy music they had abandoned long ago, having spent well over a decade moving toward increasingly pop-oriented music. I initially feared it would be a complete desecration filtered through their modern sound, and thankfully we were spared that fate. Instead, we're greeted with the same songs, the same riffs, the same structures. Everything is here except the beating heart that made them worth hearing in the first place.
There is something so captivating about the original mix of
Count Your Blessings. I can understand why some listeners are put off by its rawness, but it fits the source material perfectly. It's absolutely filthy in a way that could only have come out of 2006, and that's precisely why it works. The album oozes character and personality with an undeniable charm. That isn't merely part of its identity; it's woven into its DNA. And when you start messing with DNA... well, you've seen Jurassic Park. This remake is a thoroughly modern undertaking, embracing every nauseating aspect of contemporary production with loudness cranked to eleven. It's artificial. It's plastic. It's overbearing. Above all, it feels unnatural. The entire album sounds computerized, and if you told me it had been made with virtually no human input, I'd believe you. While that hyper-polished production can complement a modern deathcore band like Darko US, this style of melodic deathcore simply isn't built for it. The result is an album that feels almost unrecognizable. All of the grit and grime has been stripped away, leaving behind something spotless, yet utterly soulless.
The drumming is by far the worst offender. There's nothing inherently wrong with using programmed drums, but the samples chosen here are so distractingly artificial and overpowering in the mix, especially the blaring blast beats, which assault the ears for all the wrong reasons. They're ridiculously loud and painfully fake sounding. I've heard one-man slam projects with more tasteful drum programming. The riffs, on the other hand, have been completely neutered. They once had crunch, bite, and genuine menace. Now they're booming, muddy, and overbearing, with almost no clarity, hitting you with all the impact of a wet pool noodle. Combined with the artificial drumming, they dissolve into an indistinct wall of noise. The melodic leads are definitely tightened up a bit, but for me they lose the somewhat off-time sloppy charm that the original had and just pop less than they used to. The dynamics have been stripped away, leaving behind an endless barrage of modern metal soup, complete with eye-rolling and groan worthy bombastic bass drops. This type of production is a large reason why I'm nowhere near the deathcore fan I once was, all of the energy and intimacy has been zapped in favor of being as over the top as possible.
There is one lone bright spot here: Oli Sykes' vocal performance. The doubters and haters, myself included, really questioned whether he still had that dog in him. Thankfully, he turns in a vintage performance worthy of praise, even if I still prefer his original, improperly used throat-shredding highs which had such a visceral intensity. Once again, though, the production lets him down. His vocals take a major backseat in the mix, drowning beneath layers of processing that rob them of their impact. It's a shame such a genuinely impressive performance is overshadowed by so much needless nonsense. I'll also note that the album closes with an entirely new song written specifically for this remake. Since it was composed with this style of production in mind, it mostly works on its own terms. It's a far cry from a true
Count Your Blessings-style track, and the constant repetition of the title wears thin, but I can't deny I'd welcome more of this modern take on their old sound in future projects. They clearly still have the ability to write heavy music, which is more than commendable after years of releases that, let's just say, weren't exactly for me.
We are a long way from 2006. These are no longer energetic, hungry teenagers making groundbreaking music on MySpace and playing shows for about 20 people. They're wildly successful international superstars and businessmen who sell out stadiums and have songs playing on the radio. To be clear, I take no issue with that, but
Count Your Blessings belongs to a completely different band that just so happens to be called Bring Me The Horizon. It was lightning in a bottle, born from youthful recklessness and rough edges in a bygone era that simply can't be recreated with a bigger budget and modern production. It's a philosophical exercise that proves even if you preserve every single element that made the original album what it was, you can still end up with something almost unrecognizable. Some things should just be left untouched.
