As I finish up my lunch, an underwhelming peking soup from the discounter I only purchased begrudgingly out of sheer laziness, I hit the play button equally begrudgingly and subject myself to Godform, The Last of Lucy‘s newest album, once more. As the resident expert for everything death, tech, and brutal, I am just the easiest candidate for the kind of tribulation that is reviewing an album you know you won’t enjoy from the start. The Last of Lucy do many things on their albums and they have done so for many years. The space they occupy is awkward, as they started out as a mathcore band but have since thoroughly transitioned into a tech death band situated in the niche of the genre that many consider the most palatable and with the biggest commercial appeal. Indeed, The Last of Lucy play progressive technical death metal, but Godform shows its original core influence pretty clearly and the band goes into pseudo breakdown mode quite often. Whenever the band goes into a solo or has a more vocal driven section, the band will apply those gated chugs that deathcore fans and nu metal fans can bond over. The material is heavy, obnoxiously so, and the groove sections feel at times antithetical to the idea of technical prowess. Furthermore, the progressive idea gets betrayed too. Those types of breakdowns are narrow in compositional scope, losing impact quickly when the formula is deviated from. As if to overcompensate, the album is also stuffed chock full of shrill, often dissonant scale runs as they were common in early mathcore.
A soup doesn’t get better if you add more ingredients and it’s also in the technique. What you do with the ingredients before you throw them into the pot and after is almost more important than their selection, and it is the reason I bemourn the 89 cents I spent on this underwhelming meal. Similarly The Last Of Lucy and I don’t gel in the way they are approaching attitude and composition. To me, it doesn’t particularly matter how many tech death tropes they manage to shove into the album. Stylistic elements on Godform seem to appear not because the band has an interest in them or can express their creativity through them, but because variety seems to be a virtue of itself. The longer I listen to Godform, the less I care. The seldomly appearing cleans sound as bored as I am, and the saxophone, forcefully jammed into the solo section of a song, is so 2018 it hurts. For what it’s worth, there is no objective quality to it that makes any of this objectively bad. Many readers will likely read this and be fuming. Yes, I have reviewed similar albums positively in the past, but time waits for no one. In some ways, my tastes have developed away from modern tech and its tropes and in that regard, this is certainly a me issue. Yet, I can’t help but think that a lot of these things have diminishing returns. The first time you hear a saxophone in a tech death song, it’s enough to blow your mind. With every time after it, the surprise factor wanes. The first time I can actively remember hearing saxophone on a tech death album was Jack Slater‘s Blut/Macht/Frei, released in 2008. 16 years later, I don’t need just a saxophone. I want it to be good. I want there to be a creative spark beyond “we have a saxophone”. Just as I won’t get my 89 cents back, this is 40 minutes of my time I could have better spent elsewhere.
