Battle Beast - No More Hollywood Endings

This would've died in The Eclipse

I know I just recently reviewed Battle Beast's self titled sophomore album, and I stand by my assertion that they were damn great pop metal with enough bite to really stick with you despite their bread and butter being cheesy 80s dorkery.  I didn't really touch on it in too much depth there, but it's worth noting that throughout their first three albums, guitarist Anton Kabanen was the sole songwriter and lyricist.  Literally no other members wrote anything if I understand correctly, they were more or less just following his lead.  And then, for reasons that I don't think were ever really made public, he was unceremoniously booted from his own band, and the rest of the guys decided to truck on without the only guy who seemed to know what he was doing.  Maybe he was a control freak and they actually wanted to contribute, I have no idea.  I just know that Bringer of Pain was very obviously a huge step down from the previous three albums that made me fall in love with this stupid band.  Battle Beast was always formulaic, but that one really just felt like the band plugging in components into the slots where they were "supposed" to fit based on what Anton had done up until that point.  There were still some solid songs here and there (the title track is the lone fast metal song and it was good, and I'll stick up for "Familiar Hell" all damn day based on how infectiously catchy it was) but it was a clear step down.

However, I'm willing to give them time to adjust and find their own footing.  They were scrambling trying to do it on their own for the first time, surely they just needed an album to adjust.

Yeah that didn't happen.

No More Hollywood Endings, the band's fifth album, fourth with Noora on vocals, and second without Anton doing all the work, is an absolute fucking travesty.  If you thought the last album was on autopilot, this one is the part where the plane gets struck by lightning and plunges into a mountainside.  This is the sound of a band that is so clearly not trying that it's almost heartbreaking.  Or... well, maybe they are trying, but they're not aiming for the same targets they used to.

It's fine for a band to evolve of course, but you really can't be shocked to discover that an old fan like me thinks this is a fucking embarrassment.  This is pure, unabashed, shameless, cheap, idiotic, cynical corsetcore from start to finish.  All of that attitude and swagger they used to carry in addition to the inoffensive pop is completely washed away, replaced with nothing except weak non-riffs, drums that might as well be Preset #1 on a cheap keyboard, and lame vocals.  Every single song here, with a whopping two exceptions, sounds like that one shitty band that Anette Olzon formed after she was kicked out of Nightwish.  Everything is played at the same tempo, with the same chugging 80s glam riffs, with the same focus-tested vocal melodies, everything is just tailor made specifically to rack up huge hits on Youtube thanks to a thumbnail that invariably features Noora's cleavage (side note, I wrote that sentence based on years of Nuclear Blast and Napalm's lesser bands hitting huge numbers for that exact reason, but decided to double check before making that claim here since Battle Beast never really played up the sexuality despite having a female singer but hey whaddaya know the video for Eden is advertised with the exact shot I was imagining). 

It's really clear now that Battle Beast doesn't really want to be a metal band anymore and are aiming for genuine mainstream success, but before that happens they're going to need to change their name or something, because there is neither battle nor beast here.  The pop elements are no longer mere elements, they are the entire base of the songs now, with whatever metal remains being tertiary bits like a guitar solo here or a curse word there, but this is pretty nakedly just 80s pop/glam with nothing else behind it.  It's a shameless and unimaginative throwback played with zero conviction or adrenaline, it's just tracing old pictures and coloring inside the lines.  Bringer of Pain had this same problem at times, but at least the fucking hooks were good and tracks like "Straight Through the Heart", "King for a Day", and "Familiar Hell" still held on to some of that Billy Idol styled rebellious attitude to help give it an edge.  This time?  Absolutely fucking not.  There are a whopping two songs that are actually alright, and I'd seriously consider giving this hollow piece of shit a zero if it wasn't for them.  "Piece of Me" is the one time they got the glam right, sounding like a slightly more raucous than average party tune that calls to mind something like Guns n' Roses, and "The Golden Horde" is the lone power metal track, with some actual god damned adrenaline and a tempo above a standard 120bpm.  It may not truly convey Batu Khan's ferocity within the Mongol Empire but it sounds like fuckin' Slayer compared to shit like the title track and "The Hero".  The whole thing is just loaded with feckless nonsense that sounds like it's taking a real shot for radio airplay but forgot to actually be good in the process.  I guess "World on Fire" isn't the worst thing either, it at least sounds like a Battle Beast song, albeit a shitty pop one that would've been the worst one on any of the Anton albums.

I've saved the worst for last though, and that is, without even a moment's hesitation, "Endless Summer".  I genuinely don't know what the fuck they were thinking with this one.  People keep calling this one "80s pop" but I'm gonna have to call bullshit on even that.  Pop in the 80s is generally remembered (at least by me) as bombastic and silly.  Prince and Madonna were larger than life superheroes where every new release was a big event.  "Endless Summer"?  No, this sounds like fucking One Direction and I'm not even exaggerating with that.  It's the kind of gormless pedantry that a Disney tween or somebody who places 4th on American Idol goes on to make.  This kind of wispy, breezy, smiley shitheap has no fucking place even on an album as doinky and inoffensive as this.  It's some sort of midpoint between modern country music and a weak pop ballad that hovers around the bottom of the Hot 100 for a week before everybody realizes it sucks and forgets about it.  It was hate-on-first-listen and it is by a cosmic longshot the worst fucking song the band has ever written.  Even for Finland, this is fucking embarrassing garbage.

There isn't even a Berserk song this time!  Unless "Bent and Broken" is meant to be the scene with Griffith and Casca in the camp after The Band of the Hawk broke him out of the dungeon and directly preceding The Eclipse.  And if that's the case it's even worse than the previous worst Berserk song, "Touch in the Night".  Fuck this whole album.

I don't know who this album is supposed to appeal to, because it certainly isn't Battle Beast fans.  I know that because I am a Battle Beast fan who has a higher tolerance for pop than most metalheads, and even I can't stomach this weak bullshit.  This is so many steps backwards that the band is now miles and miles and miles behind where they started.  They're not even in the same country anymore.  Even the good moments are too little too late, and completely ineffectual in the face of the crushing monolith of boring corsetcore pop nonsense that the rest of the album embodies.  I have nothing good to say about this.  I can't even recommend the good songs in good faith because the rest of the album is so fucking bad.  At the time of writing this, the first track has around 20,000 plays on Spotify, and the last song has barely 9,000.  Over half of the people who started this album couldn't bring themselves to finish it.  It's so fucking bad, I'm in awe.


RATING: 4%