That's the Spirit in 1000 words.

I like Bring me the Horizon. This is where the conversation should end when talking about an opinion, but given a lot of the stigmas attached to like this band, I feel I should clarify this statement. While the less that’s said about their first album* the better, their second and third album’s really caught the attention of my brother who then tried to ram them down my ears. At first I thought that the singer sounded like a 13 year old with a sore throat and was lyrically on par with said 13 year old’s diary. Eventually I got down with the torturous vocals and came to adore those two albums, Suicide Season having more good standalone tracks,  But it’s successor** having better songs in general. Then the fourth album Semperternal hit and blew the previous two efforts out of the water. Tighter song compositions, fantastically produced and lyrics that weren’t torture. It’s one of the best albums of this decade and will hopefully stand to have quite a legacy…

…And now for the hideous electronic mess that's That’s the Spirit, their fifth album. I wasn’t going to write about this because I covered it in a podcast. But a month or so down the line and arranging my personal pics for our awards show (which should be going up on Wednesday, go on Youtube and look up Thrash Talk), I realised since that podcast my feelings had changed. I now hate it more.

Let’s run it track by track shall we?

Doomed: Reminds me of the first track from Semperternal… in the sense that the intro track was the worst thing about that album. You can hear the shift to a far more electronic based sound from this track, even when compared to the previous album. The guitar sound has lost a lot of definition and has become quite washed in with the drums and bass and apparently guitar melody became a dirty phrase during the writing process.

On this album, Oli Sykes does two things with his vocals, cut back on the scratchier screaming sounds, which pretty much is 60% of BMTH’s identity, and started ‘cooing’ certain parts of songs. If that didn’t make you cringe, then listen to the album. It certainly should. This is called dialling back your personality in order to sell more albums. Also, I like how in attempt to still keep some hard-core cred that at the beginning of this song it starts with some ominous grunting to add some atmosphere. The lyrics are standard. Nothing particularly offensive, except for that ‘you can have my heart’ line. It’s a bit wince worthy to hear the man who once wrote a song which consisted of the lyrics ‘And after everything you put me through I should have F^@king F!$ted you,” suddenly writing this schmaltzy nonsense.

Happy Song: Why was this a single? It’s not terrible. Nice to hear that Producer Jordan Fish can actually track heavy guitar, would have been nice to hear that more, Especially in a heavy rock album. It’s a pretty jumpy riff that sounds like it would be a lot of fun live, in a crowd. I just get the feeling that on a better album it wouldn’t have been featured off of the main release.

Throne: YES! More of this please! Anthemic, huge sounding, heavy! The electronic elements fuse seamlessly with the heavier guitar and sounds orgasmic. Lyrically, not too bad, helped by the fact it’s quite a simple song so there’s less room for lyrical anomalies. Why isn’t the rest of the album like this?

True Friends: Could have been ok, if not for two factors. 1) Composition. Basic Four Cord structure on the guitar, no melody line with any melody coming from some generic and basic sounding synth strings. 2) Vocals/Lyrics. Whiney and Oli Sykes proves why he doesn’t normally do conventional singing. It sounds very babyish and it’s hard to listen to.

Follow you: WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS!?!?!?! Oli Sykes coo’s the entire song, which should never be allowed in a humane society. It sounds like a boyband ballad, which would be painful enough, but the fact that it’s Bring me the Horizon is particularly painful. Lyrically it’s got everything  wrong with these kinds of songs, overly mushy, corny and designed to make prepubescent girls fall in love with them. It’s offensively terrible.

What you need: Jordan (producer) are you ok? You’re recording a metal album, this sounds like it’s off of a rejected Killers demo. It’s ok. Nothing particularly good about this song.

Avalanche: Definition of an album track. Just take a snippet of what the album sounds like and avoid being interesting.

Run: Boring. Lazy. Like my review of it.

Drown: … I like it. Sappy lyrics aside, the production is very good, Oli’s vocals are bearable and the guitar is finally given some room to have melody lines. Athemic, like this album should have been.

Blasphemy: Production murders this song entirely. If the guitar sounded anything like it did on Drown or Throne this could have been decent. But it doesn’t. It sounds like garbage and any impact or stompy ominous feel to the song is washed out with the tone and that horrendously wimpy singing.

Oh no: See Follow you for my comments.

To conclude, in attempt to sound like their previous album but more commercially viable, they’ve completely gutted their sound and have tried to put it back together with love songs and electronic elements. It’s an utter failure, and sadly it’s sold like hot cakes. So, be prepared for not only more of this from BMTH, but also the imitators that are bound to come. So summed up in one final word: Abysmal.

* Which from what I understand according to the insane people who like Deathcore was to that genre was what Solja Boy is to his

**Didn’t use the title to stick to my word-count. (It’s longer than this footnote)