Iwrestledabearonce – Ruining It For Everybody

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Many things that can be said for avant garde metalcore act iwrestledabearonce, such as ‘This isn’t really metal’, ‘Oh god this is awful’, and ‘For heaven’s sake, pick a style and stick to it’. All joking aside, the charm of IWABO is their twisted sense of humour, with weird song titles, weird videos, weird promotional antics (upsetting elitist black metallers deserves five stars in itself) and a musical style that suits this odd outlook. The problem is perhaps a side-effect of this persona – IWABO can come across as insincere, and their music is terribly inconsistent, feeling like it is being schizophrenic for the sake of humour rather than to produce genuinely interesting genre-fusion. Ruining It For Everybody, the band’s second album, does improve the situation slightly but it still lacks cohesion in places. Far too often it feels chaotic simply because it can be, and the music suffers as a result. This is a real shame because IWABO are perfectly capable of doing justice to the genres that they plunder. There are times where they manage to show their real potential in this. For example, the almost gospel end of Deodorant Can’t Fix Ugly actually sounds really good, and is given enough time to let the listener get into it. Elsewhere the shifts just seem forced and played for humour, which would have been amusing if it hadn’t already been done before. Ultimately, Ruining It For Everybody still sounds like Dillenger Escape Plan meets deathcore with less technical skill and more genre-fusion. At times IWABO actually sound really good, and they are certainly improving; other times, maybe not so much. Mostly though, it seems like they are still being difficult for the sake of being difficult. They probably take great satisfaction in that.

Written by James Donovan
More: 2011, Albums, Other, Quick.Play Reviews, Iwrestledabearonce