Killswitch Engage - As Daylight Dies

If you are already a fan of Killswitch Engage, chances are you will enjoy their most recent album, As Daylight Dies. If you’ve never liked them, this album won't give you much reason to change your mind. For my tastes, As Daylight Dies still comes across as another contrived and predictable attempt at infusing their songs with enough melancholy crooning to endear themselves to the emo crowd, while still demonstrating enough double-bass rattling and vocal tantrums to satisfy the metal crowd. I’ve long been an advocate of metal bands incorporating melodic hooks and harmonies into otherwise crushingly heavy songs, or at least making an effort to do so, in the interest of coming up with more diverse and memorable metal songs. The trouble with Killswitch Engage, and many other similar sounding bands in the sub-genre that has come to be called “metalcore,” is that far too many of their melodic hooks are not very memorable at all, and (perhaps even more upsetting), their songs aren’t even all that heavy to begin with. It’s as if none of the elements that they’ve worked so hard to incorporate in order to broaden their appeal are performing their respective tasks and so the whole work is as brittle and lifeless as a man made of straw. As Daylight Dies is a glaring example of this problem. For starters, the drums are fast, but they really don’t pound at all. The double-bass drum sounds more like the clicking of a metronome. There really are some pretty decent guitar riffs and the arrangements are not completely inept, but the production is so dreadfully clean that it turns what should be a hearty stew of materials into a watery soup. Howard Jones’ clean vocals work best in the moments where he’s sort of doing a Mike Patton impersonation, but all too often he resorts to the kind of shrill whining that sounds better suited for a Fall Out Boy song. Meanwhile, the “tormented” screams he’s trying to off-set with said crooning sound just as muted and sterile as the accompanying guitars. And these lyrics! I know that heavy metal stars aren’t exactly expected to be the Blake’s and Wordsworth’s of our time, but come ON! If you’re going to write dumb metal lyrics, at least do what bands like Manowar do and make them so dumb that they set themselves apart from all the other half-assed-dumb metal lyrics out there! Are there really just not enough metal front men belching out platitudes like “we all have blood on our hands” and “the darkness crawls forward and engulfs my will to live” to satisfy everybody yet? When will it be enough for you people? I’m sorry if I’m raving but bands who write lines like “can I see your face in these tears?” shouldn’t be allowed to make metal music without paying heavy fines. [www.killswitchengage.com]