In Dreams

After the Burial are one of those newfangled sounding 'djent' bands that seem to be spawning everywhere (strangely enough, quite a few new comers from India). Wait, better make that were one of those bands. After what is considered one of the best albums ever released by some people in a place somewhere, 'Rareform' gained some good reviews and publicity, so its always going to be hard to sound as good as the best album you could never write again. If metal has told us anything, its that to be good you need to be consistent and where most famous bands will do 3-4 early albums of excellence and then go down hill from there on (Nudge nudge, Slayer and Metallica) After the Burial haven't even managed to get to 3, and I feel that they've barely managed one with Rareform being interesting from the outside and frigidly dull in every other aspect. 'In Dreams' Initially comes off as something they've already written with the first song being what you could expect from After The Burial yet somehow, its lacking any sort of punch from previous efforts.

The vocals seem to be the main cliff drop here. New vocalist? Probably, not that it makes any difference because it sounds TERRIBLE. At least on Rareform the growls were bearable but this new vocal style is unbearably typical of the prefix-core category of genre. The screams are whiny and girly, the barky growls being as generic as they come, the cleans, the few that are there, sit in the back and have as much power as a Roland Mircocube compared to every other musical aspect of the music. The lyrics are typical metalcore, nothing interesting, new, surprising, enchanting or the least bit intelligent. Its amazing how even a band meant to be pretentious math metal can still have the bare-faced ass cheek to use bree bree. Seriously, bree bree?

Right, now a big juicy target, musicianship. To be a really successful artist, it is not necessary to be a fantastic musician, only that you can write good songs and pull them off in the studio and in live performance. Well, what most math/core bands do is get the two the wrong way round and try too much to be technical, progressive, keeping heavy and interesting aaaaaand melodic all together. Doing all five at once is something that isn't meant to be done in this style of music because it cant be done in ANY style of music, save Enslaved or Opeth perhaps. So instead of being all of them, its got some bits here which are melodic/heavy, some proggy bits, lots of math wankery everywhere and really cheesy metalcore melodies 'which have that hopeful feel' to quote a deluded friend of mine. While the riffs (which are the guitaring bread and butter of songs) are frankly awful and dated, the leads are pretty good. Actually, it puts a lot of technical death bands to shame for their complexity. Nah, I'm joking, they're more or less Necrophagist 'Stabwound' leads recycled with added cheese and melody. The bass is frankly unremarkable save the huge, fat, clangy tone that sounds like a cricket bat hitting a metal stairway banister. Drumming is also fairly boring and average, the only moment of speed being in the song 'Sleeper' which has hyper speed blast beats then a 2 MINUTE BREAKDOWN or at least that's what it sounded like.

Song writing? Of course its terrible, this is metalcore we're talking about. With little connection between the melodic moments and the 'ULTRABR00TZ' sections, each song inter melds with another: you take all the melodic choruses together, mash them up and you'd have a bad BFMV album, take all the heavy bits and put them together and you'd have a terrible Ion Dissonance album. Of course it wouldn't be -core without the almighty and bland breakdown. Well, they're not too bland, but by hell, are they bloody unnecessary. The songs don’t have much speed in them to start with and breaking the song up 3 times a tune ruins any flow, enjoyability or connection to the music which is a thing that most -core artists DONT SEEM TO UNDERSTAND. While fairly Meshuaggeh-esque in its soulless accountancy riffing, they're so atrocious I had to skip them through every song. Even fans of -core would do good to just not listen to them.

Overall its frankly terrible, Rareform wasn't anything spectacular, much like BTBAM's bloody 'Colours' which is also a wrongly praised pile of 'innovative' garbage, and there is no way ATB are going to pick up what credibility they ever had from serious listeners with this release of dumbed down, generic, bland, pitiful rubbish. Time for a good ear washout of Fleshgod Apocalypse.