Album Review: Abandon All Ships - 'Malocchio'

Holy fuck! That's probably the first thing that's going to run through your mind when you listen to satire-electronica/metalcore band Abandon All Ships. Oh, what? They're not a joke? You mean they're serious about this? Well...that's awkward.

In all honesty and all intended sincerity, this full-length is a sonic-atrocity. And that's being nice about it. In the great list of things wrong with 'Malocchio', the screams are probably up there at the top. In fact, they are not screams, they are hyena mating call impersonations. It's almost as if the screamer cannot physically bring himself to even fathom something that remotely sounds like a 'scream' as such. They are beyond hoarse and as indescribable as your doctor's hand-writing. 

The musical shortcomings extend to the production itself. There is a RIDICULOUS (it's capped for a reason) amount of low end. So much so, it becomes laughable because if someone thought that sounded good then they would love to spend their time around machinery and earthworks due to the sounds. If it was a production mistake then it is probably no fault of AAS.

While it seems only fair to employ a "don't ask about the electronic aspects" type of approach there are still major flaws that need addressing. It's so hard to find the balance. When bands mix this aspect in it can be fantastic (Enter Shikari) or dreadful (I See Stars). But in next to all cases, the electronic bits would work absolutely brilliant on their own. Not here. From the way it sounds and the lack of diversity, it's almost as if the band used Garage Band on the iPhone to create the electronics. It does nothing for the album and its songs, and only serves to annoy and ruin what is already a ruined album. In other words, please refrain from pissing on the dog corpse.

Oh and then there's the fact that after all this, every song sounds the same. No joke. If you have this on less than half volume you will mistake every song as one big long metalcore trash. The same breakdowns, riffs, samples, screams and over-auto tuned vocal melodies. And as per a lot of bands nowadays, the lyrics are so poorly written and presented it is clear they were written just for lyrical rhyme. They don't follow the same theme structure and feel so mixed mashed you will not relate to them at all.