Album Reviews : The Boy Will Drown – Fetish

I could not possibly have put this disc into my computer with lower expectations. Everything about this album just reeks of generic deathcore trash, and it seems to be very rare that I actually enjoy a new album with the Earache name on it. Needless to say, my assumption was pretty accurate.

‘Fetish’, the debut album from the young UK-based quartet The Boy Will Drown is a half hour of insanely technical musical segments thrown into a bowl and randomly retrieved in handfuls somewhat resembling songs. If you like the first song, there’s a bloody good chance you’ll like the rest. In fact, you could merge all ten tracks into one long piece, haphazardly chop it up into sections and it would be just as fluent as it is now. With the exception of a few more mellow sections, it’s rare that any riff or melody lasts beyond the ten second mark. This works well at times, boosting up the ferocity that extra notch, but there are far too many segments that just don’t fit with the next.

Then there are parts that just plain confuse me. A large part of the pathetically titled “Joseph Fritzl” is a quiet and just as bland country passage accompanied by some old-fashioned static. Not only does it sound ridiculously out of place, it achieves nothing other than letting the listener’s mind wander off. That’s not experimenting, it’s just stupid.

Cohesiveness aside, these guys are clearly talented players. The guitars and bass alike are as complex as they are fast and the drums certainly don’t drop behind. Vocally, it’s your standard deathcore growl with the occasional higher section; nothing extraordinary but not the worst I’ve heard. And despite the amount of instantly forgettable material, there are some well-organised and mature sounding bits here and there. These parts show promise, but unfortunately are never long enough to develop into anything.

The Boy Will Drown will either mature with age, focus on the moments of actual writing and claw themselves out of the infested well of forgettable technical diarrhoea they were born into. Or they’ll drown alongside the rest of this fucking mindless trend. 2.5/10

Band: The Boy Will Drown
Album: Fetish
Year: 2009
Genre: Technical Deathcore
Label: Earache/Riot! Entertainment
Origin: United Kingdom
myspace.com/tbwd

Track listing:
1. Deep Throat <- Reviewers choice
2. Irminsul
3. Josef Fritzl
4. Apollo’s Lyre
5. Dead Girls
6. Epileptic
7. Barrymore’s Pool Party
8. Akura-Class
9. Elisabeth Fritzl
10. Suis Da Luna