A return to alternative metal form is in hand for Bring Me the Horizon. Over a decade of plying their trade and only now, on Post Human: NeX GEn, have they hit on the sound which made them champions of the genre. It still verges on the pathetic screeches of Can You Feel My Heart and the heavy tech and drumming dribbles of Kingslayer, but the band is back in a form which we can consider listenable. Loud and boisterous works are the Bring Me the Horizon bread and butter and while Post Human: Nex Gen hopes to reinvent the band as a tech-reliant powerhouse, what they do with this album is maintain their stature. But doing so is a harder job than the band is given credit for. Post Human: Nex Gen is a decent spot of listenable music. An entry into heavier metal and emo-pop material which survived after the death of Tumblr as a popular platform.
What the band now sings of is being the offspring of a world gone wrong. Maintaining this message with a genuine blend of fear and rage is easier said than done. But Bring Me the Horizon manages it; with Kool-Aid, they provide a sense of isolation in a packed crowd. The lyrical dribble which occurs after it, the literal drink mentions and the desire for companionship, reduce the message to what emo-pop has struggled with for the last decade. A maintenance of relationships and the edgier side of it all ruminate not on intimacy but perverse and uninteresting materials, the chanting doing little to distract from dullard lyrical concepts. What is a solid form on paper soon becomes a creeping, hug-wanting fret fest.
Their influence on image is massive but Bring Me the Horizon is sticking to the safety of those already established aesthetics. Messy noise soon becomes the norm for Bring Me the Horizon. Basic rhyming structures and an impressive vocal range are all Bring Me the Horizon can offer at this point. Post Human: NeX GEn could have been so much more than retreading placid ground. The band may have their hearts in the right place but in effect, it becomes a substandard emo-pop experience where obvious allusions to the real world and a parasocial relationship are formed. Bring Me the Horizon sound best when Oli Sykes stops screeching like the lame banshee he is. Spoken word notes toward the end of a bulleT w/ my namE On are all it takes to hear the truth to Bring Me the Horizon. All bark and no bite music made for the hanger-on fans.
A shame too since it starts so strong. There are competent pieces of work within this release which, for better or worse, get the band closer to a contemporary, interesting sound. Play it quiet. Get through another of your emo-pop horrors. Make love to the chainsaw, as n/A so poetically puts it. Everything about Post Human: NeX GEn, from the random capitalisation of its titles to the dense lyrical documentation of life without love, is awful. It is a shame their sound, the instrumental fever they hold on some of these tracks, is bordering on remarkable. Lyrical admissions are the downfall of a band that has never managed to champion themselves as anything more than sexless loners. It gets tiresome the seventh time around.
