Review: The Amity Affliction - Everyone Loves You... Once You Leave Them
The Amity Affliction are undeniably one of the largest metal acts in Australia today, raking up accolades and top charting albums with each release. The group has established themselves as the second largest metalcore band on the continent behind only Parkway Drive. All this being said, I have to be honest, the band has never quite connected with me. I've always felt the band was just frankly pretty mediocre at everything. The singing is just passable sometimes bordering on poor, the heavy parts aren't bad but they're fairly generic. Maybe the bands style is just not my taste but I'm willing to give a fair shake to anything without any biased. So now I'll take a listen to the record and give my very honest opinion of it.
I was planning on doing a track-by-track review of this record but I just simply can't. These songs are awfully written, not just one, all of them. The choruses are horrendous both in tone and lyrical nature. The band is often seemingly just negative for the sake of negativity. One can't help but cringe at some of the cringe-worthy lyrics that this record is littered with. From repeating the phrase "smoke em' if ya got em" five times to a chorus about a cabin in the woods, there is nearly two handfuls of times I almost had to shut this record off. It's difficult to to go into as much detail on this release as I was hoping to because it became so difficult to listen to at points that I lost track of which songs were playing. The best part of this record is easily the intro track which is an awful indicator for the rest of the album.
The crowning moment of cheesy cringe on this album is hands down is the horridly titled "Alonliness", complete with comically bad lyrics and awful auto-tuned singing which rears it's head far too many times on this album. The melodramatic soundscapes scattered throughout the tracks make next to no sense and are completely unfitting. I spent much of this album, just waiting for it to be over. I didn't want to dislike this record but I just couldn't find anything to cling onto here. The songs feel so overdone and unnecessarily dramatic. If you combine all the good parts of this album you'd get maybe a good song and a half. This is a release I never see myself going back to listen to. Unfortunately this has to be the worst record if the year so far. This one gets a 0 out of 5 from us.
