Bury Tomorrow – The Union of Crowns (Nuclear Blast Records)
Tuesday, 26th March 2013
Author’s note: This review was going to be left in the vaults, never to be posted, until Bury Tomorrow released this video for “Knight Life.” Unbelievable.
As a point of comparison, playing full-fledged metalcore today was like a hair band putting a new album out in 1992. Aside from a few miraculous holdovers such August Burns Red, Killswitch Engage (their inclusion is negotiable), and Unearth, the scene had its crescendo in 2004 and steadily did a plunge into the dark waters of metal trends of yore. It’s not surprising how dated and worthless the sound has become, but lo and behold, here come another hopeful in the form of England’s Bury Tomorrow. They make it feel like it’s that year over again, but with no sign of John Kerry, Dave Chappelle, and The Darkness. Hooray for pop culture.
Possibly thinking the metal public (or underground) were stupid, Bury Tomorrow basically do a re-write of their first song “Redeemer” and try out 13 slightly different versions on The Union of Crowns. A typical BT jam includes borrowed Swedish riffs (of which only has any sort of value on “Message to a King”), the pre-requisite breakdown, and clean vocals from guitarist Jason Cameron. Cameron has a quality voice; the real beef is that they let him get out of hand and man, does it really soil things. Cameron doesn’t go totally into tight-pants-wiener-vocal-mode, but his “impassioned” vocal pleas throughout the album come across as insincere and contrived. And his counterpart in Daniel Winter Bates does the standard indecipherable burly vocal dude take, all the while sporting some serious tats. Do this 13 times over and the result is a laugher of an album.
Rather than spout off any further regarding The Union of Crowns, this video by Brian Posehn is the best overall summation of this pigsty:
(This content originally appeared on Blistering.com)
