REVIEW: BURY YOUR DEAD, S/T

The hype would have you believe that Bury Your Dead’s self-titled new release is a fresh start for the band, but as is so often the case, the hype is bullshit. So what if the songs no longer have tongue in cheek titles? They sound exactly the same as anything that appeared on the group’s last album, Beauty and the Breakdown.

In case you don’t know what that sounds like, it’s wall-to-wall chugga-chug breakdowns that, at their worst, sound a little too much like Korny nu-metal slightly re-designed for more current trends; for too many of these tracks, like “Sympathy Orchestra” and “Womb Disease,” it’s all too easy for visuals of camptocormic, dreadlocked guitarists to start bouncing through your brain. And a lot has been made of the fact that new front man Myke Terry – the band’s third since January of ’07 – “sings” on some choruses (“Hands to Hide the Shame,” “Fever Dream,” etc.), and while I appreciate the seeming lack of autotune, these choruses are still pretty much screamed, and the attempt to inflect them with melody mostly makes it sound like Terry can’t stay on key to save his life. I’m all for clean vox, but only when your vocalist can actually sing, and, alas, it would seem that Terry cannot.

The final aural letdown of Bury Your Dead is Jason Suecof’s production; Suecof has done a lot of brilliant work in the past, but everything here is too synthetic-sounding by half.

Look: occasionally, BYD seem to stumble upon a head-bang worthy breakdown. But that’s just the laws of mathematical probability working in their favor; if you hit on enough chicks in one night, one of them is bound to fuck you, right? I see no reason to pat Bury Your Dead on the back for accidentally accomplishing that which other bands do with greater skill and thought and seemingly less effort.

(two out of five horns)

-AR