Review of NAME - Internet Killed The Audiostar

NAME's ironic name is a bit ironic. The ironic name NAME is ironic because this band that couldn't determine a better name than NAME has both a lack of and a crisis of identity. (To be fair, NAME is an acronym for "New Approach to Martyr’s Expression," but that’s also not a good name, although on the plus side, it isn’t ironic.)

At times--more often than not--NAME falls squarely into the Between The Number 12 Tapdance Extravaganza And Me noodle-core scene, jumping with careless abandon from spastic runs beneath screamed vocals into jazzy bass-driven segments beneath crooned vocals and so on. Death metal moments run head-on into hardcore angular riffs into grinding blastbeats into Killers-esque synth pop. Like so many of their peers in this scene, NAME has some good ideas, but their inability to focus upon any one particular pathway for more than half a minute renders those snippets of quality too ephemeral to redeem the record.

When they’re not jumping around in an endless arpeggio or a chunk-heavy breakdown or a lounge-jazz fretless bass blurble, NAME suddenly becomes a Neurosis-y post-rock experience, with the requisite heavier than hell chords, sluggish tempos, jangling clean guitars and anguished vocals. Typically, NAME doesn't so much blend their two approaches as they tend to just alternate between them, giving Internet Killed The Audiostar a perplexingly disjointed feel, even more so than the manner in which most technical metalcore records are perplexingly disjointed. The album’s strongest points are largely contained within the four-part epic that sits squarely in the middle of the disc, marooned and bookended by protracted moments of a far less-interesting mathcore madness. While those four interwoven tracks contain many instances of skreeing noodle, they’re still the only moments on Internet where the band's chops and ideas don’t far outstretch both their reach and my attention span.

Ultimately there’s still a problem at play, which is simply that, in either direction, NAME still isn’t anything special. They’re described as "experimental death metal / grindcore," but what’s experimental about either mathcore or post-metal these days...? (If you want a better, less irritating blend of those styles, check out The Psyke Project’s Dead Storm.) While NAME’s Neurosis imitation shows promise and is infinitely better than their spastic genre-melding metalcore—both in execution and simply by artistic nature—neither is anything but late to the party, and the whole of Internet is such a damned mess that it’s difficult to recommend to anyone.

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NAME

Internet Killed The Audiostar

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