Thy Art Is Murder - Dear Desolation

For a band that’s supposed to be a shining light in the vast boring depth of deathcore (according to what I keep seeing published about them), and for an album that’s supposed to be a glorious welcome home to CJ McMahon to the vocal helm, Dear Desolation is merely a hair above standard at best as it gets for Thy Art Is Murder and deathcore. Gang-vocals,predictable breakdowns, half-committed hardcore posturing, this album has all the shit you’ve heard from Whitechapel, All Shall Perish, and Carnifex. I’ve said before that I am not against deathcore on principle, but the adage of it being so cookie-cutter across the board does hold credence and Thy Art Is Murder do push the mold a bit more than the usual deathcore band on this album. CJ does do a good job bringing the songs to higher heights in terms of energy, but it’s not consistent and often he seems like he’s doing it all on his own. The band also seem to be trying to awkwardly channel Behemoth kind of the same way Max Cavalera did on Soulfly’s last album, but just in tiny doses. They do, however, shine when they play to a more tight death metal style that showcases their technical abilities, but they lose momentum falling into deathcore’s notorious ruts. If they approached these infamous characteristics of deathcore with more unique flair, I could see this being one of the genre’s greater albums, but too often the band shows that they have better chemistry as a death metal group only to neglect it for what seems like simply an obligation to the subgenre that made them famous.

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