Review Summary: Still caught in a Catch-22 scenario.
It’s pretty crazy to think that a band who turn 10 years old this year will be releasing their sixth album. Equally crazy is that during this time, Miss May I are still yet to gain considerable reception even with the extensive amount of material they have produced in such a short amount of time. Consequently, the band seems to be in this strange position where they aren’t going forwards or backwards. After the tepid
“Rise of the Lion”, 2016’s
“Deathless” provided the Miss May I with another shot of greatness, however, the band missed the event, let alone the target.
Six albums into a band’s career and you’d expect them to have established a strong foundation or method for simply working with what they know best and doing it well. Strangely, Miss May I has accomplished this as each album features strong, driven songs that seem to tick all the metalcore boxes of the average Impericon fan. However, this safe, unadventurous approach is exactly what prevents them from moving forward. It’s Catch-22: they can’t move forward because the albums they end up releasing sound no different to each preceding album, but they can’t go backwards because they’re always consistently satisfactory.
Predictably,
“Shadows Inside”, Miss May I’s sixth album, is still no different to everything they’ve already done. Unchanged in structure, lyrics and performance, the songs on
“Shadows Inside” could have been plucked from the band’s back catalogue and you’d have a difficult time being able to tell the difference. Like many other bands, Miss May I utilise the laziest way of creating a catchy chorus by way of wordless chanting in numerous tracks, most prominently in “Swallow Your Teeth” (which would ironically explain the wordlessness of the lyrics). Ryan Neff’s poppy, clean vocals are presented during “Under Fire”, “Crawl” and “My Sorrow” with the sole undemanding task of creating an uplifting atmosphere and increasing accessibility which, admittedly, he achieves in doing so. However, the clean vocals during “Never Let Me Stay” sound so cheesy that one could probably gag upon hearing them.
What Miss May I haven’t done is what makes this album an improvement. Staccato breakdowns have been ditched completely, as have the incomprehensible wails and uninspiring guitar riffs. Instead, Miss May I have wisely chosen to replace these clichés with striding melodies and driven riffing. The title track immediately identifies this alteration as it starts off with a riff worthy of late-Megadeth complete with rapid blast beats to support this new, hectic tone. Heightened by the acoustic introduction, “My Destruction” features a defiant rhythm that creates a massive atmosphere which, for once, does not rely entirely on clean vocals to uphold the mood. In these fleeting occasions, Miss May I display their true potential although these moments are too few to make
“Shadows Inside” an invigorating album.
Personally, I think the milestones of metalcore can be represented through 3 of the genre’s vital bands: Killswitch Engage, Trivium and While She Sleeps. Metalcore was new and exciting when Killswitch Engage materialised, Trivium was the best out of the bunch when it was at its most popular and when the quality of bands begun to degrade, While She Sleeps came along to revive the genre. Each band also represents a different era of metalcore and their swift ascension is due to their enormity of their shared ambition, moreover, each band consistently progresses with each album. The reason behind Miss May I’s current stationary popularity is down to their formulaic tendencies and, overall, a lack of ambition or dare to develop themselves; even after six albums.
