Review Summary: Sophomore slump exemplified.
Finding merit in
Suicide Season is like searching for a needle in a haystack - it exists, yet it refuses to expose itself to the listener. In other words, its greatest shortcoming is inconsistency - specifically within its midsection. Insipid writing festers within its viscera, leaving any value that remains within sorely overlooked in the minds of those who have not the time nor the willpower to trudge through this chaotic mess. Perhaps calling this a “sophomore slump” is imprecise, as the highlights easily soar above those of
Count Your Blessings. To
Blessings’ credit, it IS consistent in its mediocrity, so I will grant it that. I will not bestow such immunity here, as while the highs are certainly high, the lows are ghastly.
Suicide Season begins its aural reign on a competent opening stretch, with such numbers as The Comedown and It Was Written In Blood contributing notable improvements over the band’s predecessor, and Chelsea Smile becoming a pillar of every Bring Me fangirl’s playlist. That being said, the quality of its first three tracks didn’t last. It degenerates into banality promptly after It Was Written In Blood concludes, mutating into a forerunner to what I regularly refer to as “Drop G Trendcore,” an atrocious and diluted form of metalcore that abuses open strings, typically downtuned to Drop G as the name suggests. Death Breath adds little of merit to speak of, Football Season Is Over is only entertaining if you turn your brain off and overlook such lines as “party til you pass out, drink til' you're dead / dance all night till you can't feel your legs,” and Sleep With One Eye Open suffers from such a volume of amateur stylistic shifts and histrionic platitudes that it’s difficult to pinpoint precisely where they went wrong.
Albeit the stint from Death Breath to Sleep With One Eye Open is tedious and marks a decline in writing quality, it’s the final four tracks that illustrate the essence of
Suicide Season, no longer hinging on multi-track stretches, whether well-done or banal. Instead, the band structured the final two-fifths of the tracklist so as to shift between atrocious and prodigious on a whim, with Diamonds Aren’t Forever and No Need for Introductions ranging from the former’s insipid simplicity to the latter’s merciless trial of endurance. The Sadness Will Never End and the eponymous title track don’t even remotely sound like they belong here - both are tastefully written and performed, improbable to feel out of place on the band’s third release, possibly to be applied in place of Blacklist or The Fox and the Wolf. Then again, this presumably would not have fared as strongly as it did, had it not been for tracks like those to reinforce the album's artificial perception of dynamic.
Highlights:
The Sadness Will Never End
Suicide Season
be sure to leave a pos if you liked how it was written lol
