Count Your Blessings

Album Review

The debut full-length by Sheffield metalcore merchants Bring Me the Horizon adds little to the existing knowledge base of the style. Lead singer Oli Sykes looks disconcertingly like Saturday Night Live star Andy Samberg and sounds less like the Cookie Monster (the usual point of comparison for metalcore singers) than like one of those silly voiced creatures in the cantina in the original Star Wars movie: his high-pitched gibber of a voice is Bring Me the Horizon's most notable feature as well as its most immediately irritating. Aside from that annoyance, Bring Me the Horizon are vaguely interesting musically in that they often resist the urge to simply pummel every song into high-speed blastbeat submission: there's a greater sense of dynamic than usual in these ten songs, including the well-deployed use of hardcore-style mosh parts in between the furious headlong blasts. Sadly, however, the generally unimaginative songwriting and Sykes' mannerisms spoil most of the potential fun.