Review Summary: I should have known.
Bands shift in styles all the time. This isn’t always detrimental; sure, you could keep churning out the same material year in and year out, but after a while it doesn’t hurt to spice things up a bit and add a little something extra to perfect your formula. Most of the time you can see these changes coming from miles away and they hardly cause a surprise. You always run the gamut when you do these things, however, since not everybody is going to be a fan of the new status quo. It especially isn’t good news when you take what made you strong and interesting and push it aside like a new In Flames album. Inevitably, in their switch from pop punk to mellow rock, Apologies I Have None make a few errors along the way.
Pharmacie is by no means a terribly bad album, but it leaves much to be desired. You’ll notice right away that the timbre of the guitars is now noticeably different, as is the production. Coupled with more emotional lyrics, the band is evidently aiming for a more melancholic, atmospheric approach. This tactic leads to a more build-up oriented approach reminiscent of post-rock. The new style works quite well on opening numbers “Love & Medication” and “Wraith,” with the vocal performance still ringing strong and true beneath powerful chords. The climaxes are always punctuated and have strength behind them. Nothing really seems to be very off until you reach the seventh track and realize that you haven’t really had any good song to rock out too at all. In fact, every track starts sounding eerily similar.
Unfortunately,
Pharmacie lacks the heavier tone of
Black Everything and loses the pop punk jams from
London. Everything begins to feel incredibly rigid in structure and you get very similar experiences for every track; the vocals start lower with some light drumming in the background and some atmospheric sounds. Then the guitars enter about a minute or so in, play a strong chord, then they continue to play them until the end of the song. Rinse and repeat. “Anything Chemical” and “Goodbye Peace of Mind” are quite nearly the same song, wherein they set the same mood and have incredibly parallel progressions. When the eight-minute track “Killers” rears its head, it’s nearly offensive how much the tunes blend into each other. The aforementioned climaxes are abused heavily. Thankfully, you have a more
London-esque romp in the form of “Everybody Wants To Talk About Mental Health,” but it’s only a semblance of the material the band used to release.
Perhaps the transition into morose waters would have been more beneficial had the band merged aggression and pop punk with their new emo, post-rock style. Apologies I Have None clearly still has the chops and they still manage to pull of memorable, catchy moments. What ultimately drags them down is how slow and similar things become, a problem magnified as the album goes on and on. All of their new tricks are used so frequently that they no longer seem new and potentially exciting; come the time the listening experience is over, all ideas have been worn out and tired. There are some hints of greatness inside
Pharmacie, but they’re just hints and not much else. By the end of the day, it’s another band doing another change in sound and getting lost on the way.
