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Bury Your Dead

It's Nothing Personal

Written by: BL on 11/07/2009 00:38:26

Bury Your Dead are one of those bands that have always had problems striving for stability in lineup, having rotated through a dozen ex-members of all sorts. The last being one of their long serving guitarists, and since the last album was the first to feature current vocalist Myke Terry, it was maybe on the cards that this album would showcase a change in musical direction perhaps. Fans were already bemoaning how different the band was now becoming anyway, but they would be in for a rude awakening with "It's Nothing Personal". Having listened to the previous 2 records, this one comes off as some kind of half baked crossover of nu-metal and metallic hardcore and is barely recognisable as the band they used to be.

For one thing the last album remained fairly close to the band's signature breakdowncore sound. But the first big change is that there is now abundant use of melody (shock horror) and lead guitars all over and even a few solos. Songs retain a very mundane verse chorus verse chorus style structure pretty much the whole way through. In a sense if you found the old Bury Your Dead repetitive for having nothing but pretty much all breakdowns every song (I enjoyed it as a fun gimmick), you're probably still going to find it repetitive here as most of the songs are so similar it becomes a textbook exercise. Furthermore, vocalist Myke Terry has expanded to using clean vocals pretty much on every track (some even having only clean vocals) that was only previously shown glimpses of on the self titled previous record. He isn't a bad vocalist, but at time it sounds a little awkward with his varying mid tone cleans wavering a little and his hardcore-ish growls coming off as a poor man's Corey Taylor impression. Unfortunately his lyrics also tend to seem very teenage and angsty with lines like "You know I hate them all, You make me hate them all" and "This is real pain, These are real tears, This is the world falling on me."

This was never a band to expect finger blazing riffs or noodling guitar wizardry, but it feels like the rhythm guitars seem to have a taken a step backwards. They still chug-chug-chug their way through 12 long and exhausting tracks but everything is now taken out of a nu-metal textbook, and feels like something I expect from Five Finger Death Punch or Slipknot with moshwarrior appeasing breakdowns still making the occasional mark. The melodic parts would have been a welcome change on the older Bury Your Dead records as a way to perhaps break monotony, but probably not in the gratuitous amounts here which isn't helped that they are fairly simple and nothing really that outstanding in being consistent with the bland heavy areas. Still they are also the best part of the music now, the melodic intro to "The Great Demonizer" is perhaps the most melodic this band has ever been, and some of the little short solos here and there tend to be fairly tasteful and short enough not to waste too much more time than the rest of the music already has.

This album was tiring to listen to, boring, repetitive and so grossly uninspired. I don't quite understand the decision to change the musical direction so drastically: the new changes alienate a lot of existing fans (the ones still left anyway), while at the same time they aren't strong enough to make a whole lot of new ones for me. The end song "Closed Eyes" literally could bring your eyes to close for being so dull and pointless as a meandering ballad-esque finisher that leads into the rather empty and hollow piano outro "Enough" (at which point I had literally had "enough" with the record), both tracks so out of their place for a band so well known in the past for unrelenting aggression. Finally it makes me feel that there isn't much hope for this band, accuse me to being harsh to change or so called progression if you will but they should have stuck to their day job.

Download: Hurting Not Helping, Broken Body, The Great Demonizer
For the fans of: Slipknot, Five Finger Death Punch, Sevendust
Listen: Myspace

Release date 26.05.2009
Victory Records