In the past few years dance music has pretty much become a common part of metalcore, with so many bands incorporating electronic elements. It’s success has been a very mixed bag but recently bands such as Crossfaith and Issues have really begun to master it, can Eskimo Callboy continue this streak of great dance-metalcore records? The short answer is no. It might only be the very beginning of 2014 but We Are The Mess could be one of the worst albums to be released this year.
It turns out We Are The Mess is a very appropriate title for this album, as the album is very much a mess. At it’s best it’s just an incredibly generic metalcore album filled with repetitive chugging riffs, breakdowns and synths. Occasionally a dubstep section is thrown in because what dance album is complete without dubstep right? Vocally the screams aren’t too bad either but that’s about as good as this album gets. Everything else about this album is terrible. From the awful album artwork to the terrible song names such as “Jagger Swagger” there is very little about this album to recommend. Whilst the screamed vocals generally aren’t awful (apart from the occasional screamed rap section) the clean vocals suffer from far too much autotune which makes them incredibly annoying.
Lyrically the album deals with such complex themes as drinking, having sex and partying on pretty much every song. Whilst sometimes these kind of songs can be fun, when almost every song is about the same thing it gets incredibly tiresome and there album is full of some of the worst lyrics featured on a metalcore album in recent memory. Some people will try and defend Eskimo Callboy by saying they are just fun and aren’t meant to be taken seriously but that is no excuse for releasing music this bad.
There really is nothing to recommend about We Are The Mess, dance and metalcore have been to combined to much better effect by so many bands now. Whilst it might be too early to call We Are The Mess the worst album of the year I doubt there will be many other albums which are this bad. If you even have the slightest interest in electro-metalcore there are much better choices out there than We Are The Mess.
