Ever been totally shocked by an album that you figured you had pegged on name recognition alone? It's dangerous to make assumptions like that, and the most recent proof exists on There Is A Hell Believe Me I've Seen It, There Is A Heaven Let's Keep It A Secret.
The first minute and fifty-six seconds or so of the album's opening song, “Crucify Me,” are exactly what every fan AND detractor expects; screamer Oli Sykes sounds as though he has already come unhinged from the moment he hits the ground in the song and programmer/bellower Jona Weinhoten sounds abusive in his closer-to-baritone assault. The guitars buzz with frenetic urgency and match the terrifying speed of the drums. This is those fans who were won over by both Suicide Season and Count Your Blessings laid their money down for, and they are repaid instantly and in kind.
After that first minute and fifty-six seconds though, you can actually hear Bring Me The Horizon implode. That's not an overstatement; the band literally turns “Crucify Me” inside out right before listeners' ears and that's when everyone starts paying attention. After that first minute-and-fifty-six second rave-up, Bring Me The Horizon throws every new-fangled, Top 40 and gothic digital effect into the mix and, astoundingly, it makes for a most profound musical epiphany; there is nothing like it in popular music of any kind right now, and it's truly exhilarating and disquieting to hear (the proof of that lies in the fact that Amazon has included this disclaimer on its' site with the disc: “Please note: The first track "Crucify Me" on the new Bring Me The Horizon album, There Is A Hell Believe Me…, contains digital effects within the song that are fully intentional. This is not a defect.”) and completely unlike anything one would expect from an aggressive rock band. Suddenly those bizarre vocal clipping effects typically used to make the voices of everyone from Cher of Britney Spears sound like hiccupping androids turn sinister and vile when they approach Sykes' desperate shriek and the guitars seem to reach through headphones and physically maul eardrums – it's just remarkable.
That staggering moment two minutes into “Crucify Me” is largely a one-off gimmick (it's not like it happens on every song on There Is A Hell Believe I've Seen It, There Is A Heaven Let's Keep It A Secret or anything), but it is enough to totally reshape the listening experience for anyone within earshot. From there, a tempestuous metal maelstrom flies fast and furiously out of songs like “Anthem,” “F**k,” “Home Sweet Hole” and “Blessed With A Curse” which batters listeners into submission, but doesn't leave it the single easiest thing to qualify either; between the gothic synths, the phenomenal screaming and the breaking, hard-stop song dynamics, the album sounds a lot like what one could assume Alexisonfire might were George Pettit steering that ship. At the same time, everything about those songs (and more) is tight enough to imply that a tremendous amount of care was put into the arrangements and dynamics for these twelve songs to achieve maximum impact every time rather than simply lucking into the perfect cross occasionally. Because of that implied delicacy too, there is the possibility that more than just metal-heads will be able to access and fall under the spell of There Is A Hell Believe I've Seen It, There Is A Heaven Let's Keep It A Secret; there's no chance in hell that the album will be a crossover hit or anything, but the myriad elements that obviously went into There Is A Hell Believe I've Seen It, There Is A Heaven Let's Keep It A Secret cause it to defy convention too.
Artist:
www.bmthisdope.blogspot.com/
www.myspace.com/bmth
Album:
There Is A Hell Believe I've Seen It, There Is A Heaven Let's Keep It A Secret is out now. Buy it here on Amazon .
