Album Review: Beartooth - 'Disgusting'

Hype is a bit of an understatement when it comes to Beartooth. Hell, it’d be better off to call it a craze. The band’s mixture of thrashy, meaty riffs and grooves thrown with some of the biggest choruses and melodies you’ll hear all year has governed the band a near cult following already. So when the group announced their debut album, ‘Disgusting’, it’s safe to say there were some happy fans.

Yet hype...uh, craze, can often kill an album as such, the case with Beartooth is thankfully far from that.
‘Disgusting’ is downright crazy. It’ll be blaring with distortion and raspy vocals one second then serenading you with a hook filled chorus the next.  

Breakdowns and chugg riffs are in abundance but serve the songs equally, not the other way around. The record handles its melody in much the same form. Each songs aspects and traits aren’t there for the sake of aesthetic; everything has an emotion to convey. If there’s a sing-a-long, it’s there to signal that Shomo’s feelings are ones we often all share. If he’s screaming at the top of his lungs and the band throwdowns like they're in Terror, you should take the hint that he’s not too happy.

With this form of writing and structure everything has purpose. The songs are given a whole new dynamic and level of sincerity that helps to not only keep the flow but simultaneously keep it away from the repetitive and uninspiring.

Yet the icing on the cake for ‘Disgusting’ comes at its final minute. As you’ve just listened to a multitude of harmonies and melodies laced with intense and ferocious breakdowns, Beartooth leave you with something that can only be described as wrenching.

‘Sick and Disgusting’ begins to fade out with feedback from the guitars and a heaving, sobbing Shomo crying over and over, “Daddy I don’t want to be sick and disgusting”. It pulls at every fibre of your being as his voice begins to break and shake. Every emotion that Shomo and his band mates have poured into this record is given in a snapshot right then and there. The anger and the sadness. The frustration and the triumph; ‘Sick and Disgusting’s’ ending portrays the band just how they sought out to be, honest.