Review Summary: More like Unbearable.
A soldier, seven feet tall, wielding a double-barreled rocket launcher, runs across a sea of sand as fast as possible. He zig-zags across the ground, dodging bolts of light and heat from the hostile violet craft pursuing him a couple dozen feet above. With incredible speed and precision, the soldier leaps into the air, simultaneously firing his rocket launcher at the ship. It connects, and the explosion force blasts him backwards into the sand several dozen feet away. He can only lie there for a moment, before another hostile troop transport arrives and the battle continues.
The preceding paragraph describes a possible scenario from the universe of Halo, Microsoft’s wildly popular sci-fi shooter video game. Said game is the subject of the song “Headshot!”, and if you’re wondering why a paragraph about Master Chief begins a review about a metalcore band, well, it’s easily the most interesting thing related to
Unbreakable.
There’s no beating around the bush here:
Unbreakable has nothing that could truly be called a redeeming feature. This is metalcore at its most generic, its most simplistic and pretty much without merit. Instrumentally, it’s par for the course: guitarists play simplistic leads and plenty of semi-technical riffs in between chugging and numerous breakdowns (more on those later). The bass is nonexistent, or at least for anyone not inside a car with good speakers. And as with seemingly most boring metalcore bands, the drummer displays the most talent, but his sometimes-interesting fills, predictable double bass and otherwise “good but not great” parts aren’t enough to save
Unbreakable.
All this is not a recipe for a terrible album, and if there were strong vocals, the end result could be acceptable. What kills the album is threefold: the vocals are bad, mundane breakdowns are painfully abundant, and the lyrics range from cliché to laughable. To get an idea of what Matthew Hasting sounds like, imagine that Don Campan (Waking the Cadaver) and Grant Luoma (After the Burial) have a child. Young Matthew wants to be like his parents, and thus delivers almost his vocals in a low, guttural and annoyingly raw growl. His bandmates play their instruments somewhat well, but due to lack of ideas or the need to be br00tal, breakdowns litter the album. You’ve heard them before: sporadic chugging synced with snare hits and constant cymbal crashes, often with Hasting yelling lame lyrics over the top.
Even with all the crap that's come out of the genre, it's hard to think of something quite as bad as this. The only redeemable aspect of
Unbreakable is “Headshot!”, which features lyrics such as “
I am the master chief/No one can mess with me” and “
Let’s start a match, Team Slayer on Lockout/Battle rifles blazin', you're gonna get knocked out”. It’s the only moment where MyChildren MyBride stop being serious (hopefully) and have
fun, which is good because the other 9 songs certainly can’t be described with such a word. Unbreakable? Not hardly. Good? Nope. Unbearable? Definitely.
![http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc96/katrinasrevenge/BOOM.jpg[/img]](http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc96/katrinasrevenge/BOOM.jpg[/img]){kind=link}