I'm not gonna call this Pallbearer style of "doomgaze" or whatever a plague on metal or a Trojan horse for lame hipsters who don't give a damn about the genre or anything, because if I don't like something it's pretty easy to simply not listen to it and I don't really care if people like things that I don't, but I will say with authority that this Pitchfork-approved go-nowhere nonsense is almost invariably terrible, and King Woman does nothing to dispel that prejudice. I got this admittedly entirely on a whim because the cover art was super cool, but that's really all the band has going for it. None of these riffs are compelling, the whole thing just drags and plods along with no sense of urgency, wonder, malice, mystery, or anything that doom needs to work. This is all just... there. There's apparently an interesting tale about how this band came about, with the vocalist leaving a shoegaze band and starting this metal band to lash back at the religious institutions of her youth, but if there's any true lingering hatred and frustration behind the band it is wholly drowned out by plodding riffs that elicit precisely zero emotion and some of the most lethargic, tranquilized vocals I've ever heard. You know that (beautiful) meme where people find all the most absurd and surreal ways to remix "All Star" by Smash Mouth? Well one of the best ones is where somebody remixes every note to be C. Every vocal line, every chord, every bassline, it's all just this one continuous streak of the same monotone shit and it sounds like the audial representation of an anxiety attack. That's what Created in the Image of Suffering reminds me of. Kristina Esfandiari is just a flat out terrible vocalist. She sounds like she's trying to record vocals in her bedroom without waking up her parents. This kind of dreamy monotone can work for something more apocalyptic and creepy like Chelsea Wolfe, but this isn't that. It just sounds like a really lame practice session for a bunch of kids, none of whom are any good at their instruments, and the person doing vocals doesn't actually have any real singing talent so she just drowns herself in reverb and hopes that covers it all up. If you forced me to say something nice, I'd say "Utopia" has a pretty cool riff hidden under what I think is supposed to be the chorus, but it's insanely overshadowed by the insultingly bad vocals and multitude of weak ass riffs with pointless shoegazey clean guitars layered over them. I'm willing to bet anything that this has a great rating on Pitchfork.
*checks*
*8.2/10*
HA! I'm good at this game.
RATING - 17%
No comments:
Post a Comment