aaamusic | On 05, Jun 2012

Oh Christ. If there’s a dilemma that could only happen to a critic it’s what’s happening now. Y’see, Death of an Artist suffer from mind-numbing averageness, they’re not that bad, they’re not that good, consequently it’s extremely difficult to find anything to say beyond “They’re alright”. One could look at the band and try to find a story to base the review on, with no such luck, same deal with the music, it’s not good enough to recommend over the mountains of worthier post-hardcore bands out their but not outright bad either. This is a problem precision tooled for music hacks like me because no-one else has to comment on this. The punters can turn it off or go to the bar while they’re on, the average music fan probably will never hear this kind of music in the first place, let alone this band in particular, but pity the poor critic, for he/she has to sit through and drag up 500 words or so on music that can be summed up in less than half of that. Truly, we critics have the toughest job of all do we not?
Anyway, Death of an Artist are a post hard-core five piece from Bournemouth, and it’s truly a disheartening prospect when the most interesting thing their own press release can say about them is that they play their own instruments and perform live without the aid of auto-tune, midi’s and triggers, as if that gives them some kind of superiority over bands that do. In my own little world it doesn’t matter at all how you perform the songs, if the songs are good I’ll listen. If you tune your own guitars then wonderful, so do a literally uncountable amount of others, if you can’t write songs that keep people’s attention then I’ll find someone else who can. On the strength of this, their debut album, Death of an Artist are another band in an extremely long line that I’ll forget about the moment I finish writing about them. X is a record that I’m getting tired of hearing, overly serious post-hardcore with more vocalists than ideas (one for ridiculous sounding roars and one for annoyingly American sounding singing, by the way), every track sounds pretty much identical, churning rhythm guitars, reverb-laden leads, guttural growls and drums that desperately want to play fast and loose with time signatures but just sound tired at the end of the day. There’s also the trusty “Slow and deeply personal” number the closing Abuser (yep) that, I shit you not, has the opening lyric “Suffering is it enough to break you down?” Weirdly enough this, to my knowledge, is the only overtly cringe-worthy lyric on the album as everything else just doesn’t seem to be worth commenting on.
To be quite honest, the whole ordeal almost wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the way the press release seems to talk them up like the second coming of Black Flag, it even goes so far as to say that there is a Death Of An Artist “Ethos” which would make me retch if I wasn’t too busy laughing. In all this should be fun live but it’s not worth the price of a drink let alone a ticket, this is just boring; an almost steadfast refusal to adapt and create something new in an already crowded genre that is worth none of your time, effort or money.

★★★★★

Will Howard