3.8
Sheffield boys get overzealous with full-on seventh + second in post human series.
Oli works it out
Finally. One of the biggest four-piece to spruce up a perfect soundscape for an anime fight scene stop the dilly-dallying and catalogue all their castaway singles into one shiny surprise album. Featuring shiny sTraNgeRs and Die4U that were released a mere two years ago, POST HUMAN: NeX GEn comes with a catalogue of new workings-out and old news in an effort to remain both consistent and relevant amongst an ever-changing landscape of what genre this bands’ music is now.
But they’ve finally gotten around to it. Originally planned for September, the album was released as a surprise this week with the recrods’ itchy trigger finger, encompassing the second instalment in the POST HUMAN series – an angry conversation about human existence in a glitchy-robot apocalypse. The album comes four years after the first and so with all that planning on the road and in-house, does it show promise of a band returning to their formative Sempiternal years?
POST HUMAN: oNE HOT MEss?
NeX GEn has almost double the run-time compared to its prior counterpart, clocking in at 55 minutes – compared to POST HORROR’s half hour. With an album loaded with such noise, it can either go one or two ways. It’s heavily nurtured album with a lot of thought behind it with songs positioned in a way so it listens well or it’s an album mashed together with singles showing off a bands’ old sound interposed with the new. Unluckily for Oli and his crew, it’s the latter.
While it’s a mish-mash of hyperactivity and inconsistency, NeX GEn is a lot fun by and large; packed to the rafters of screechy breakdowns and glitchy overdriven nonsense. Fans of old and new will surely lap this up.
Firm favourite Kool-Aid keeps its head on straight with a scorching choral route that maybe Architects’ Sam Carter may want to have word with Oli about. The mob breakdown is shit-hot, too, which always helps. While liMOousine is a seedy return to drop-D territory, the amount of unavoidable autotuning makes AURORA sound like GLaDOS from Portal.
Underoath-backed a bulleT w/ my namE On and R.i.p doesn’t add any further excitement to the aforementioned end-of-the-world but its electro-buzz synth whirlygigs makes me feel like I’m Sonic in Green Hill. The slower taste of n/A offers up a nice breakaway while AmEN! is a digital override as we get the password wrong again, again and again. It’s enjoyable only if you’re plugged in yourself. The 16-track mammoth slog ends with DIg It. A scorched-Earth temperament, it demonstrates the bands’ intent with this album. It’s a colossal finish to an album that otherwise sounds somewhat out of sorts.
A hard-hitting heavy metal swamp of hyper-pop and sizzling breakdowns that draft back in fans who had once stopped listening altogether. Bring Me of the old have come up with a hot-headed mess of good and bad noise – and all it’s taken them is ending the world.
manvmusic.com 
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