Beartooth - Disgusting (2014)

People say yellow Starburst are disgusting but they're wrong. Mail me all of yours.

I can appreciate the sentiment in some of these songs, such as "Beaten In Lips" where Caleb Shomo sings "This is for the kids with the beaten in lips, whose parents tried to shut them up using their fists, keep living loud and proud! They never can hold you down! This is for the kids with a soul like mine, when people tell you living is a waste of your time, keep living loud and proud! They never can hold you down!" and in "Body Bag" also sings "If I could set the clocks back, I wouldn't be headed for a body bag. One life and one decision: Make sure it ends with you still living!" it's just like I said: I can appreciate the sentiment because some kids really need to hear these songs, but to pretty much everyone else, these songs will appear as absolutely cheesy as fuck, as Caleb Shomo goes with good-cop-bad-cop vocals constantly. He isn't a bad vocalist at all in either field, even if not particularly noteworthy, but when you're screaming shit that's basically the equivalent of "DON'T DO DRUGS, KIDS!! YOU'RE COOL AS YOU ARE!!" then it doesn't matter who the fuck is screaming/singing it: It comes across as an after-school PSA more than anything else.

What's pretty hilarious is that in the middle of all of these good-cop-bad-cop songs that range from mediocre to okay, there's a pretty fucking good track called "In Between" that feels like it has a fully-fledged (read: not a few painfully blunt and corny repeated statements about life and getting a grip on it again) chorus with Caleb Shomo delivering possibly the catchiest chorus on the album, and wouldn't you know it: That's the ONLY track on the album produced by John Feldmann. Say what you will about him (especially about the new blink-182 album despite it being kickass) but he has such a great ear for melody, even if the track falls victim to one of his typical tropes, being the whole "repeat part of the chorus but have it be quieter and shit before fully kicking in" and I swear the album would've been better with John Feldmann fully behind the wheel, reading the newspaper and occasionally saying "Yeah, Caleb, that's pretty cool but nah" while dipping a bagel into his coffee. Speaking of production, however, the bass isn't totally forgotten, and there are moments on the album where they don't forget to show it off, which is sadly something many metalcore bands fail at, but hey, let's not get too gratuitous with the praise: MANY other metalcore bands manage to make metalcore that sounds exactly like this otherwise.

It took Caleb Shomo a lot of strength to recover from his addictions, mainly his alcoholism, and same with the ability just to be able to publicly talk about it, but he just can't find many ways to talk about it, much less ways that sound genuinely sincere and that they came from an actual alcoholic, so it's basically a tell-all that's all been told before in many more interesting ways, although I admit that "Sick and Disgusting" hits a bit close to home. There's plenty of hooks on this album, but not that many to actually latch onto. They certainly sound like they could put on a fun live show for the kids as long as it wasn't on a school night, but all they can really manage to do is make a full-length metalcore album that's right in the middle of the road, with nothing really that good or that bad to say about it. It just kinda exists in an ocean of other metalcore albums doing the exact same shit, and who knows, they may be doing it better, but I'm not exactly excited to leap into said ocean head-first to find out, because who knows what else I'd find?! Maybe an airplane! There's more airplanes in the ocean than submarines in the air, you know!! *hearty middle-aged dad laugh*

5/10
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