City of Dis

Was Mike Patton involved with this? It's almost inconceivable to me that he wasn't. I mean, The Mass have a vocalist that also plays saxophone. They have a lot of really repetitive, one-chord riffs that burst into proggy sections. They have a tendency to suddenly slip into funk amid all the thrash. Didn't Patton have a hand in this?

I imagine the band composing a profile for themselves on OKCupid. "We consider ourselves serious guys who care about our music, but we also like to have fun and rock out sometimes!"

Please. The guy who says he's serious most of the time but likes to let loose usually isn't much for either, and we can apply this principal directly to The Mass. In short, The Mass are a band who do some variety of metal- I guess crossover or some other very vague fusion of punk and metal- but also prominently feature a saxophone as well as a lot of pseudo-funk sections. That chill that just ran up your spine? No one walked over your grave just now, you simply realized the inherent douchiness of this idea, and even moreso if you remember shitty, unbearable bands like Mordred who attempted a similar idea over a decade previous to this album with similar levels of failure and shame.

The Mass, like Mordred, is similar in that they attempt to be proggy, but instead of pure Dream Theater worship like Mordred, there's a lot more pulled from the more self-involved sections of the post-hardcore scene alongside some abstract dissonance and a sense of pacing taken right from post-rock. They've mastered those particularly obnoxious, go-nowhere plinking strummed riffs that seem part and parcel to this general style of music, along with impressively aimless drumming and vocals that are so irrelevant to the music they might as well not be present.

The Mass are not very good at metal and not very good at jazz/funk, and even worse when they try to put the two together. Then again, the two styles of music are basically on complete opposite sides of a fence through much of the album: short of when the saxophone plays over lurching, simplified Dillinger Escape Plan riffs (a moment which seems to happen on every song), the jazz/funk and the boring pseudo-metal rarely interact with each other. The metal is lifelessly bouncy and 'quirky', reminding me of another grasp towards System Of A Down-style eccentricity, and the jazz/funk is entirely meaningless, brought out purely to inflate the running times of tracks and bore the listener with yet another artistic flight of fancy. I would vomit if I could stomach the motivation to really hate this.

There's a moment on 'Hex By Hex' where the distorted guitars drop out and the vocalist sings some pensive clean vocals- it sounds like the more restrained moments of older emo bands, which really sounds a lot more like what these guys should be doing. Unfortunately, they chose to do metal (kind of) and suck at it instead. Avoid.