Jesus Christ.

I tried to like this, I really did. It’s sort of melodic, experimental metalcore with lots of progressive moments, solos, clean vocals and such, but ultimately when delivered with such shitty musicianship and production; it pretty much ruined melodic metalcore for me.

With tangible influences like Misery Signals, Shai Hulud, Bewteen the Buried and Me as well as a piece meal deathcore crumble, Poughkeepsie’s Bless The Fallen are if anything, ambitious, squeezing as much as they can into each song, but its kind of like a mongoloid trying to write a book on molecular biology; the desire is there and he may be able to write or type certain words and even sentances, but the end result is a jumbled, chaotic mess with a few faeces stains, which you look at, smile and say “That’s very nice, Jacob. Now go back into the corner and keep playing with your own shit”.

The bands attempts at multi- layered harmonics, while occasionally coming together to form something somewhat listenable (“In Search of Words”), more often than not sound like a high school band warm up-if the whole band had guitars and drums. That’s to say borderline musical cacophony of squeals, noodling and fundamentally terrible arpeggios. Throw in atrocious clean vocals, horribly out of time breakdowns (“The Fine Art of Pretending”-did you guys even practice?) and the now standard interludes and acoustics (“Eclectic Sounds”) and the recipe is perfect for a steaming bowl of cliché.

The fact is, go listen to the excellent Belay My Last or Born of Osiris, or even middle tier acts like One Dead Three Wounded, My Bitter End, The Demonstration, Veil of Maya, The Storm or The Concubine if you want something of this style but far better. Of better yet wait for the new Shai Hulud album.

[Visit the band's website]

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