IDEAS OF REFERENCE

What a mess this is, albeit an occasionally interesting mess. I guess it helps if you try to listen to the other mess of an album that is Dillinger Escape Plan's "Calculating Infinity", which somewhat better in the sense that there's melody there placed somewhat better in between music, even the songs are indistinguishable, but this seems to follow the footsteps of the aforementioned album. Like a lot of bands trying to follow a certain interesting concept, they tend to fail because they don't understand what to do with these ideas and worse is when the idea was pretty mediocre to begin with.

As much interesting as the drumming and the amount of impressive capabilities these musicians have here, they are tossing atonality and melody in the worse ways possible, almost like they were recording different songs and mixed them together by mistake. One time, they'll playing some jazz fusion, then they will go into atonality frenzy, then play some other scales. Worse is the lack of hooks here too. It makes most of these segments just go by just like that and become forgettable. The only thing that it succeeds is in making it kind of flow well a lot, but still, not quite pleasing.

Overall, if you dig atonality to Iwrestledabearonce degrees, more power to you, but this is just overall borrowed ideas that this band doesn't know how to use properly and end up being a rather forgettable and at times a chore. If this is their best, I don't want to figure out what else they have to offer.

3.5