Asking Alexandria - Asking Alexandria


It’s almost the end of the year and one of metal’s biggest nuisances of this decade (from what I can tell from what’s written about them online) squeezed another project in just before the new year: a self-titled project. Being self-titled I figured this album was as good of a candidate as any for my first time listening to Asking Alexandria (though Suicide Silence proved the self-titled status of an album a poor metric for gauging how much an album represents a band’s sonic identity). This album will probably also be my last time listening to Asking Alexandria.
I was able to go into this album with pretty neutral expectations, but right from the introductory track, “Alone in a Room”, the album began it’s downhill roll, if not a complete nosedive. The song features a nauseating blend of plain vanilla, sugary, brittle singing combined with repeatedly recycled metalcore riffing so unoriginal and that basically has no presence in the song drowned out by corny production tricks. This can be said about just about every song on the album, which all feature the cliché “wild card” of synthy and late 2000′s pop electronic production flair sprinkled everywhere, cliché attempts at big uplifting choruses, the same structures everywhere, even an unacceptable frequency of those faux-indie “woahs” on numerous tracks usually reserved for an album you’d find at the cash register in an Urban Outfitters. The “diversity” among the songs boils down to wannabe ballads and wannabe arena rock anthems, but the ingredients are all the same low-grade metalcore meat and expired pop-trend sauce.
To get into a few more specifics (which I’m not sure is even worth the time to type as I’m typing this), the song “Vultures” butchers a decent set-up for a crescendo given by its bridge in favor of a repeat of the crappy acoustic alternative swooning preceding it. And with the album already wearing away my last drops of  patience, the second to last track, “Empire”, brought my face straight to my desk with a ridiculous trendy rap verse feature and some of the cheesiest feel-good-y alternative rock I’ve heard in a long time.
This album was really hard to sit through, so hard. It’s not even the kind of bad that’s bad in a unique way; everything I heard on this album was the same bland soup of overused and overtried musical ideas that I’ve already heard executed poorly by better bands. Sitting through 44 minutes of it while looking right at my favorite albums of this year on my wall was practically self-inflicted torture. This album left such a terribly bitter taste in my mouth, I have to revise my list of ten least favorite albums this year to make room for it. The current number 10 on that list sure caught a lucky break getting bumped off at the end of the year. God was this album a bad one to end the year on!

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