💾 Archived View for milddermatographia.com › post › impermanence › index.gmi captured on 2022-06-03 at 22:49:27. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Review: Impermanence - Abbey Road Version by Architects

I found this song and was immediately torn.

I figure it's both worth sharing and criticizing heavily, so without further ado:

The Good

Bringing in an orchestra for this song was a brilliant decision.

The strings are emotional and sweeping, the brass is powerful with wonderfully dark downward slide at some points, the bells(?) are such a great touch for the breakdown.

Sam pulls out some disgusting low growls that really should have made it on to the original recording.

Those lows and more singing variation across the whole song elevate the vocals from generic metalcore to something unique.

The Bad

While the use of low growls during the verses feels very fitting/earned, their use going into the breakdown completely ruins the build-up before dropping into it.

Maybe they just mixed his voice a bit too quietly, but it took all the momentum away from the song.

The Ugly

One reason I like metal with incompehensible lyrics is that it doesn't matter if they're cringy as hell because you can't understand them.

In this case, Sam screams with an impressive level of clarity and mixes this with clean vocals, revealing the ridiculously cliche lyrics.

Some samples:

"Swimming with concrete shoes"
"Can you see the writing on the wall?"
"'cause nobody wants to meet their maker"
"we die alone, we die alone"
"Again and again and again and again and again"
"Do you really wanna live forever? ’Cause those afraid to die will never truly live"

The lack of originality is unreal, and I regret being able to understand what he's saying at all because of the overwhelming edginess.

There's also some weird lyrics that make no sense at all, like saying that we're eviscerated, or that we're living a cameo.

There was one cool line ("Riding a torpedo, wе wash away into the overflow"), but other than that, the lyrics hurt on an emotional level.