Forging a Future Self

Generally speaking, "Forging a Future Self" falls to the worst of crimes a band in its first steps can commit - taking a ride on an overloaded band-wagon, just for the sake of saying "we can do it too". And it's a shame, because there are buckets of raw talent on "Forging...", and if they've took the time to cook this album, it's very likely that this album would get up to twice in score, especially if minding their awesome accomplishment on "Rareform". But apparently something was tickling them up their asses to craft a totally unrefined album, pack it up and even to accumulate the balls sell it.

But first, a snippet of praise.

As said above, "Forging..." doesn't utterly suck, namely for two reasons: Justin and Trent, the guitar players. Say what you can say about After the Burial, the immense talent of this couple is undeniable. Apart from the top notch technicality of their work, the array of influences is vast - melodeath, old school heavy metal, punk, thrash, classical music, and I've probably missed some more elements, but they all are incorporated in the writing, offering you a rather fresh and unpredictable experience, so I guess that could be a commendable fact...but only if they've bothered to implement it right. And yes, here is where "Forging..." start to fall off the cliff.

I encourage progression in music and exploring outside the limits of the verse-chorus-verse structure, something that works well on "Rareform" and even on a few songs on "Forging...", but the majority of the album ends up being a convulsive jumping from A to Z to G and henceforth, piling up draft ideas with little gradation or logical integrity in them.Now that's enough to turn a potential masterpiece into garbage, but that's just a tip of the iceberg of what turns "Forging..." into pure torment. And I'm not speaking of some classy, "Saw" movies style of torture - I'm speaking of getting chained to a train an hitting the rails as it moves on an offbeat.

There's this guitar technique, made popular by Meshuggah and Dream Theater, and has endorsed as a required attire by every hardcore/deathcore band in existence. I call it the "chugger", and it consists of continuous strumming of a single palm muted power chord in variating, often odd-time signed patterns - you know it more as "breakdowns", but this term existed long before deathcore came to fame. Now, as the initial idea of After the Burial was joining this bandwagon, "Forging..." became a chug-fest, as expected, with no regard whatsoever to the fact that even the lousiest of the deathcore bands incorporates chuggers only - as said over head - as breakdowns, so just so happens to be that the chuggers on "Forging..." have gained a life on their own. There's not a single song without extensive appearances of the chugger - verses, choruses, breakdowns, what have you - regardless of how well does it integrate in it, and it shows. Even the better songs and ideas (like "Pi" and "Isolation Theory") quickly become a mind numbing fest, entirely dedicated to an enthusiastic and senseless chugging, as if reproducing the effect of a skipping CD became an artistic statement. Given the fact there's no shortage of creativity on the rest of the album, I can only guess what the hell they were thinking.

I mean c'mon - Meshuggah have made their career on chug-fests, way better performed by the way, and even they've ditched it.

This album has 9 tracks but clocks only a little more than 30 minutes, with literally half of them are wasted on chuggers. I should actually be thankful for that, since another couple of minutes would surely send me on a killing spree, but I can't ignore the fact that many of the chuggers were simply put with the intent to bloat the length of the album, or to compensate on lack of better ideas, maybe even as a last minute decision, as if they were recording this album at a gunpoint. Take "Isolation Theory" for an example: the actual song ends halfway in his "massive" 2:45 minutes, and then the last minute and something is spent on pointless chug trade-offs. What else can I add? The bass player and the vocalist are mediocre, the drums are poorly programmed, the sound is bearable at best, but it's not like it could have saved the album or made it worse in anyway. And thank you mister vocalist for ruining the good half of "Isolation Theory" with that "wooooooow" scream, I really appreciate that.


Overall: The only thing that's worse than a bad album is a disappointing album. So much talent got thrown out of the window for all the bad reasons you can think of. So if the point wasn't clear enough this far - don't even bother to download it, skip right to "Rareform".


[Favorite bits: ...You're kidding, right?]