Bloodlined Calligraphy
They Want You Silent
5.5
If you're really not up for reading the entire mess below, I'll spare you and give you a quick summary. Bloodlined Calligraphy play Christian metalcore. They come from Michigan. They have a female vocalist, which doesn't really matter. Although there's a few alright parts, they're nothing you should waste your time or your money on. They're unfocussed, but with potential to be good if they drop their attitude and concentrate on writing songs instead of throwing parts together. Now, onto the full dissection of the album.
Combining metallic hardcore with modern metalcore, and throwing in a bit of thrash and anthemic hardcore for good measure sounds like a great idea on paper. But unfortunately, They Want You Silent ends up sounding like a mishmash of a bunch of good ideas but with only fair execution. Not to say the album doesn't have its enjoyable parts - there's a handful of decent riffs that could be effective under the right circumstance, occasionally something interesting like a bass break, and their galloping parts are good but vastly under used. The vocals of Ally French aren't bad at all, usually. Although she's probably at a disadvantage simply because of her gender (No, I'm not being sexist, but it's true - men and women have different ranges), she's laudable in her ability to hold her own in the genre. "Know When To Hold 'Em" has an infectious riff that's negated by a juvenile breakdown and a poor melodic punk part that seemingly comes out of nowhere, where the gang-shouts cause the vocals to sound flimsy and weak. Again, on a different album, it might've worked excellently, but on here it's a baffling songwriting move. And then there's "Know When To Fold Em," which I like to refer by its alternate title "The Song That Starts Out With A Really Dumb Dedication And Has Multiple Mosh Calls For Some Reason I Am Unable To Figure Out". This contrived track which features everything formulaic and negative about metalcore completely ruins my desire to give this a fair review, as such idiocy on a record irritates the hell out of me. "Saturday Night In Dixie" doesn't help either, using a terribly thought out breakdown with artificial harmonics before randomly switching over to a part that sounds like it was taken note for note from Every Time I Die. Then, to top it off, "A Variety Of Damage" ends with this spoken part "and with the flame of the truth, burning within our hearts" that precludes a senseless breakdown which is just a bunch of chanting of "we will set this world ablaze."
Add all this to their incredibly preachy and obnoxious diehard Christian lyrical content, and you have something that I'll never go near due to my own personal values. I know this probably isn't the case, but their whole "I'm Christian, You Gotta Problem With It?" mentality just seems like a terrible gimmick. I don't have a care in the world as to what beliefs a band holds so long as I can't tell. Frankly, I'll be surprised if they don't pray in the middle of their set, during one of their hackneyed and chunky breakdowns. If this is what Jesus would do, we'd all better hope there's never another resurrection.
Bloodlined Calligraphy deserve better than this, n the way that a decent person deserves a relationship free of abuse; that human to human way. They deserve to be able to hone their abilities and create something good, but we, as listeners, also deserve to hear something interesting. There's a lot of clever material here, but it's just bogged down with parts that don't all line up in terms of creativity, and completely ruined by dumb personal decisions and a sense of self-righteousness that's prevalent throughout the disc. Personally though, after some of the corny asinine bullshit I've heard on this record, I'd like to see a massive pile of copies of They Want You Silent burning in a tar pit. Is now an appropriate time to make a pun about wanting them silent?
Why the fuck would you do a mosh call on a CD?
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Bloodlined CalligraphyYpsilanti
9/19/2006