Emmure - Look at Yourself

I have not kept up much with Emmure and all the controversy that has continued to surround them and this new album of theirs because much of the controversy that seems to follow this band has been very manufactured in nature by vocalist Frankie Palmeri and seems to follow a pattern of the try-hard edginess that’s designed to get people talking about the band and their music. And the music has really not been all that worth talking about: the same djenty, rap-infused-nu-metal-influenced metalcore and deathcore from beginning to end on the last few albums I’ve heard from them. Eternal Enemies had to have been one of the most boring albums I’d heard all year when it came out. I only revisited it to write this, and it was not a renewing experience.

This year, Look at Yourself comes after the replacement of the entire band except for its sorta-notorious frontman Frankie, who has not had much of a break from the shitstorm he keeps brewing up about himself and his affairs online. He and his former bandmates seem to be repeatedly beefing very openly and publicly about their issues with each other as professionals and as people, and that is about all I know concerning the controversy over Emmure. I don’t know enough to really make heads or tails on Frankie or his former bandmates in either of the aforementioned respects really, so I’m just going to leave this to the music.

Look at Yourself in many ways is business-as-usual for Emmure, no notable stylistic departure or exploration, generic metalcore and nu metal chugging, and Frankie telling everyone to fuck off because he doesn’t give a fuck… and delivering other swear-saturated rapped parts to further his hyper-confrontational bravado. The band has kept it around 30 minutes again, a time frame that best suits their quickly-tiring style, but this time it really seems like the band has done some actual fat-trimming and put on a little more musical muscle, which could be attributed to the addition of almost all new members with new perspective and ideas. “Smokey” and “Flag of the Beast” are the prime examples of Emmure doing their thing at their best. Much of the album, though, doesn’t quite match up and kind of passes by unenthusiastically, with Frankie sounding like an overly-serious Fronz from Attila without any sense of humor, and with a few higher-pitch guitar tweaks constituting the excuses for uniqueness on a lot of the songs.

After giving it its fair share of listens, I really don’t think there’s much else to say beyond it being a slight improvement on Eternal Enemies, and I don’t think there’s any way a further knowledge of the drama surrounding Emmure would alter the framework of this album enough to put it in a perspective in which it somehow doesn’t sound like just another chuggy, edgy, jumpdafuckup-y Emmure album. Again, with how little I know about them, I can’t make any kind of statement of opinion on who’s right about what and who’s wrong or if Frankie’s a piece of trash or not. I don’t know, and it’ll likely take Emmure’s music becoming a lot more interesting to me before I care enough to involve myself in whatever seems to be going on with these guys.