Pop Evil – Skeletons
Release Date: 17th March 2023
Label: MNRK Heavy
Bandcamp
Genre: Hard Rock, Metal, Alternative.
FFO: Alter Bridge, Stone Sour, Breaking Benjamin.
Review By: Mark Young
Downtuned guitars, synths, what say you? It’s not often that I form opinions from the first 30 or seconds of a song starting. Unfortunately, it happened here.
Paranoid comes across as what I can describe as the sort of music, I would tell my kids to turn off immediately. It sits with me in the same way as Linkin Park and I know they just exploded, but I never liked them. There, I said it.
The songs come and go, with no redeeming features, and it leaves me thinking that I’ve grown so old and inflexible that I should take up shouting at clouds. I reminded myself that it wouldn’t matter what age I was, I would still hate it.
Go Me.
So, let’s go with the positives. It’s polished, well produced and there’s a lot of effort gone into making this sound the best it possibly could. It has the correct ratio of shouty then singing parts, with a heavy guitar tone that seems to be everywhere which the ‘Kids’ will love and at some point, one of these tracks will appear in an angsty teen drama where they stand around and talk about their feelings. It will fit that bill superbly.
I am probably the wrong person to review this, and then I heard Sound of Glory and I wanted to kick a cat. Any cat will have done. The latter tracks develop more momentum than the ones preceding and do fit within the scope of the album and possess that harder edge that is missing. But it is not enough to save it, as they continue with the same pattern as before.
I feel like an absolute arse typing this as I am desperately trying to find more positives to talk about, and I can’t because it is possibly the worse thing I’ve heard in ages. And I go to open mike evenings.
For me, the negatives outweigh the positives because it feels as though as it has been written by committee with a list of topics to tick off and if this is what heavy rock sounds like in 2023, I just don’t want to hear it. I understand that some of the lyrics are about uplifting and positive messages and this is something I can get behind, but I just don’t like it.
01. Arrival
02. Paranoid (Crash_Burn)
03. Circles
04. Eye of the Storm
05. Sound of Glory
06. Skeletons
07. Worth It
08. Who Will We Become
09. Wrong Direction (Feat Devour the day)
10. Dead Reckoning (Feat Fit For A King)
11. Raging Bull (Feat Zillion)
(2 / 5)
