For I am King - I

I forgot to think of a title

I'm gonna be real with you all, I only stumbled across this because I'm a masochist who occasionally trawls the "metal" section of Spotify to see what's hip with the kids these days (spoiler alert, it's all still nu metal, djent, and metalcore; all the "false metal" trends have long surpassed "trend" status and are here to stay, well out of our view as snobby purists), and this was just the first new release listed from a band that was listed on MA.  Unsurprisingly, they're metalcore.  And unsurprisingly, they're exceedingly mediocre.

I've been vocal enough over the years about how I break from many of my contemporaries in that I don't loathe metalcore on principle.  I think there's plenty of potential for the modern style to be great if a band goes full out one way or another with it.  The problem is that many bands just... don't.  They stick to a template of inoffensive melodeath with clean choruses and breakdowns every once in a while and that's the beginning and end of the creativity.  That's where For I am King stands, right smack in the middle of the bell curve with seemingly millions of other bands that sound exactly the same as them.

That's not to say that I is a terrible album or anything, there are certainly things about it that I like.  Alma's dedication to purely harsh vocals is nice and helps keep the aggression high without the melodic moments ever taking center stage.  You could argue that this keeps the album pretty one-dimensional, and you wouldn't exactly be wrong, but it does help the album avoid the pitfall of giving lame cliche hooks center stage and souring the aggressive parts.  As much as I like As I Lay Dying, there's no denying that the clean choruses often sound wimpy as shit and take away from the surprising adrenaline of the verses.  There are boatloads of melodic guitar lines that flitter away in the background that try to help the songs soar above the meaty riffs underneath, but they never really succeed in providing that epic sound I'm sure they're going for.  The breakdowns are pretty consistently great though, smashing through with vigor and providing a really strong counterpoint to the A Plea for Purging/Phineas style melodic noodling that permeates most of the runtime.  Credit where credit is due, these dudes can bring the house down when they focus on it.

The problem is that they just... don't most of the time.  The components are there to put the aggression center stage but they spend most of I with one foot in the pool, never truly diving in to any one element that they could focus on.  As a result you get decent melodeath with decent melody and good breakdowns that come far too infrequently to really rise above and become a true highlight.  It's very thin and spread across the board, and unfortunately that's how most metalcore winds up sounding.  I hate that I have to start every metalcore review with a caveat that "it's not that bad guys!" before just proving how watered down and mediocre snobs like me always say it is anyway.  There's really nothing to stick here, and that's a shame because I feel like this could be excellent, but I also feel like there's really nothing to point to that could potentially be a highlight if it was approached differently.  Maybe the breakdowns, but that's not really something I'd want to hear either.  I guess For I am King is destined to be yet another face in the crowd.  Sorry y'all.


RATING: 51%