Review Summary: Complacent, boring, and insanity incarnate
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Well, maybe not the legal definition, but it certainly describes Architects to a T. Since
Daybreaker, they have seemingly been content with self-plagiarism; almost every song here blends in with each other. It’s
boring. Sam Carter’s competent at his craft, but every single song is centered around him. After a few songs of hearing him scream-sing the same four lines multiple times, you start to realize that the album has little identity other than the poorly-developed and one-dimensional lamentations of a thirty-year-old man over the death of their former guitarist. Yes, that is indeed a lamentable subject, as they lost someone who was so integral to their sound, and in the drummer’s case,
his own brother, but you really cannot hear the depth of the emotion due to the way the songs are structured. The only song that remotely sounds different is “The Seventh Circle”, everything else blends in with the insanity incarnate that Architects have been doing for the last three albums. The only reason that song is different is because it was written as if it were disconnected from the rest of
Holy Hell as a whole. Complacent, boring, and insanity incarnate. Sooner or later, this will catch up with the boys in Architects, and they will either fade into obscurity or finally evolve their sound.
