It has long been MyOpinion that, if there truly were a merciful God above, He/She would spare us from about 95% of the music made in His/Her name…
MyCleverGeneralizations notwithstanding, Alabama’s MyChildren MyBride is apparently a force to be reckoned with in today’s metal and hardcore scenes, if you take the opening line of their Myspace bio at face value. (In fact, MySayingSo would actually be “the understatement of the year.” Gods Of Hyperbole, please forgive MyIgnorance.) And if Lost Boy is any indication of what’s driving the metal and hardcore scene these days, then the metal and hardcore scene has lost this boy, because what’s here is as rehashed and underwhelming a record as has graced MyEars in a long while, all second-rate breakdown-stomping Gothenburg-quoting gang-vocalling Bible-thumping chugga-chugging whisper-to-screaming (quite-literally-)honest-to-God modern metalcore.
The production is decent, on the plus side–as polished and tight as you’d expect given the style and the label. But that certainly can’t overcome the sheer banality of everything else, from the hackneyed riffing to the shout-along choruses (most notably the title track, which spells itself out during a hardcore chant) to the lack of any remote tinges of virtuosity, outside influence, progression, regression, lateral movement, or any other minute facet that could possibly set MyChildren MyBride above or even beside the scant few other Christian metalcore groups in MyCollection. The record spins; the record stops; the music is gone, and none of it stays in MyHead. Not for MyLife can I remember any particularly stupendous aspect of any of it.
It’s no secret that metalcore is pretty much as played out as it possibly could be, and despite an enthusiastic publicist declaring them some kind of guiding light, MyChildren MyBride does nothing to separate from the pack, nothing but add to the downward spiral of mediocrity and interchangeable blandness that plagues their chosen style. MyAdvice is to skip this one.
Still, in MyHeart I know that somewhere in the South, there’s a twelve-year-old at a youth camp telling his friends how this is the sickest, most brutal record he’s ever heard.
He is the Lost Boy, MyFriends. May God have mercy upon him…
(On a side note, if you’re not certain you wish to listen to MyChildren MyBride, but you would like to smell like them, I’m happy to report that you can. They sell their own fragrance, right there on their merch page. The scent of wholesome heaviness, a bargain at ten dollars a bottle…)
