Album review: Killswitch Engage: 'Killswitch Engage'

Killswitch Engage desperately want to be taken seriously. Only problem is, they’re purveyors of a genre of music that’s so intrinsically hyperbolic that every move they make seems forced. Metal and hardcore both straddle the fine line between respectability and discomfiture as separate genres; fusing the two only causes the likelihood of getting it right to significantly diminish, as evidenced on this, their self-titled latest effort.

The album is coated with the most cringe worthily ‘sincere’ lyricism known to man, delivered in bouts of anguished screaming that sound like lead singer Howard Jones is about to successfully evacuate the world’s largest turd from his bowels. He sets the tone with opener ‘Never Again’, yelling ‘this is a war of attrition!’ and promising that some unnamed target ‘will never be forgiven!’, while wishing them life-long suffering. While this is likely to be a cathartic experience for Jones, for the rest of us, it’s just excruciating, coming on like the sort of unnecessarily dramatic blog post written by an emotionally affected fourteen year old. The predictably basic militarism of the music doesn’t help either; it’s pedestrian rather than exciting, ridiculous rather than intense.

Unfortunately, this is all that’s on the menu. The album moves from one pre-pubescent temper tantrum to the next. When Jones sings ‘I want no more of you! Watch me walk away!’ on the atrocious ‘The Forgotten’, your response is more likely to be a shrug of the shoulders than solidarity. And then when he cries out for someone to save him on, you guessed it, ‘Save Me’, you look around for some other sucker to do the job. It’s all hopelessly ‘woe is me’, which is both frustrating and disappointing in the extreme, especially when one considers the lengths the band go to disguise it. The album is filled with catch-all song titles like ‘The Return’ and ‘The Reckoning’ which seem to promise something epic but ultimately turn out to be a load of self-indulgent twaddle.

Musically, Engage have at least a modicum of talent dripping from their nail-painted fingertips but sadly, they choose to put it to use making bloated metalcore that sounded tired and lacklustre the moment the genre was conceived. This album is no different, plodding along aimlessly, crushing you under the weight of its adolescent hyperbole. Three songs in, you’re twiddling your thumbs; five songs in, you’re listening to something else. Probably best not to bother at all then. (2/10)