REVIEW: BRING ME THE HORIZON

BRING ME THE HORIZON
There Is A Hell Believe Me I've Seen It, There Is A Heaven Let's Keep It A Secret
VISIBLE NOISE/ EPITAPH

Many a moon ago, when this writer was a giggin' scribe amongst the Brit metal magarazzi, a scruffy little E.P entitled This Is What The Edge Of Your Seat Was Made For, the debut outing by Sheffield newcomers Bring Me The Horizon, landed with a clunk on the In Tray. Looking like the pre-pubescent siblings of the Trenchcoat Mafia in the throes of a gender identity scuffle, they sounded even worse: a sloppy cut and paste job of schlocky, squawking riffs, random rhythms and spooky leads straight out of Luigi's Mansion, BMTH evoked At The Gates on Ketamine, falling down those steps outside Regan's house in The Exorcist.

Suffice to say, the critique was less than kind.

A few years, two albums, a seemingly unstoppable (and for a time, inexplicable) rise in popularity, an infinitude of online debates and a metric fuckton of hyperbole later, and the humble pie is sliding down pretty smoothly - thanks for asking. Not in memory has a Brit metal band, nay a band of any kind, undergone a personal and public metamorphosis on the scale of Bring Me The Horizon, who, on the eve of the release of this third full length, have not only evolved from squirming larvae to Papilio glaucas in a musical sense, but who have forced public perception of their craft to pull a careening U-Turn along the way.
For the latter achievement alone they should be awarded a medal or five, it's not often enough that the music business blushes and stares at its shoes after all, but then we'd be overlooking what is truly interesting and vitalising here: namely the fact that Bring Me The Horizon's new record is a serious, fully fledged blinder.

Ramming out of the gates with the raucous Crucify Me, There Is A Hell's... opening salvo is bold, bolshy and bananas - B.A.N.A.N.A.S - its six and a half minutes loaded with more ideas and ambition than most bands manage in a whole album. Truly a song that has to be heard to be fully comprehended, but its loaded bases might just have rewritten the rules and set a new benchmark, not only for BMTH's peers but for modern metal en masse - it should speak volumes of the album's strength and the new found musical authority of its authors that it is but track 1.
Throughout the album's 52 minutes, the quintet take the foundations laid on 2008's turnaround album Suicide Season and turn every stone, cranking each idea and tentative experimentation up to a glorious 11: the melancholic build and male/female call and response of Don't Go presents the Metal Ballad reimagined, whilst the chantalong choruses of Home Sweet Hole and Anthem evoke Slipknot or Machine Head in their rousing, fist pumping immediacy. Elsewhere, Josh Franchesci of daytime radio pop rockers You Me At Six puts in a personal best on the bluntly titled Fuck, whist the sludgy, menacing riffs of the awesome Blacklist flip a forged titanium bird to any would-be detractors still claiming that Bring Me The Horizon aint a metal band.

With this album of contrasts, surprises and glorious scope, BMTH have truly completed their public reinvention and defiantly come of age in the face of tutting nonbelievers. There Is A Hell... is surely a first chapter in what could now quite conceivably be a lengthy and influential career for the band at the head of this country's metal scene and beyond.

Funny, but humble pie actually tastes way better than we thought it would.

WORDS: ACHIEVATRON