von Oliver
am 18. August 2023
in Album, Heavy Rotation
Johnny Booth succeeds with their third album Moments Elsewhere a metalcore consensus that sticks out at the fan intersection Frontierer, Every Time I Die and Grayheaven should ensure wet panties.
Let’s not beat around the bush: Moments Elsewhere behind its ’00s nostalgia cover in AI high gloss and the extremely compressed production mix (by Ray Marte and Anthony Lopardo), which almost unconsciously shuts down, is actually the best thing that has happened to the genre in a long time – and just the beginning along with the following first third of the album, furios succeeds outstandingly.
In 2040 force Johnny Booth a potential nu metal riff including hammering glitches so gripping in the mathy metal core that the chuggy oversteering wrecking ball with shimmering flags grabs immediately and the galloping at breakneck speed Collapse in the Key of Fireworks still ignites more directly until the band joins in Roots intersperses a rhythm intermezzo that makes you dance in the metal disco, which leads into downbeat stoicism and will tear every pit together. Here a band optimizes their previous way at the limit right from the first meters.
The intro from Full Tilt squeezes out of the subdued club atmosphere but again intricately stepping on the gas pedal so directly that all the power and energy of the performance almost bludgeons the subtle nature of the songwriting and technical attention to detail out of sight, the catchiness only provokes the clusterfuck, because the New Yorkers always then, when the craving for harmony threatens to become a bit too cheesy, turn the vise in the meat grinder higher – and then just a song like The Ladder refill, the quasi Vein,Are Slipknot in the Glazed-mode expresses and conceals that pathetic Fleshwater-memory chorus makes it structurally perhaps a tad too intrusively simple. However, thanks to their subtle use, the invited horns fit perfectly and anyway the imbalance between clearly dominating brutality and sparsely remaining melodic clarity fits.
This is namely only in the second half of Moments Elsewhere to scenes that obligingly tilt into obtrusiveness that is easy to consume: especially when Gatekeeper a clean sing-along crowbar on the catchy tune used far too often as a chorus, and Bright Future lives out its trendy nature almost cheesy solemnly on run-of-the-mill material – that’s when the panic Ring Light Altaran incredibly urgent one No Comply as well as the heavy ending Modern Dialogue around it, no matter how aggressively you get everything out of the Duracell storage pack.
This more mass compatibility, which is greater than the base of Connections and Firsthand Accounts allowed, don’t even want to be understood in the contrasting context of the record itself and unfortunately overshoot the mark.
The middle part of proves it Moments Elsewhere how to do it After The Mirror like a spring-like field recordings interlude as an easy listening trip hop dream, for a relaxed and easy relaxation on androgynous Portugal. The Man makes you think, offers room to breathe deeply, the bridge bends from Only by Name (Is that Nu Metalcore or Alternative Math-Metal?) only vaguely descends into smooth Alternative Rock, but with that takes away the anthemic orientation of the pathos-coming one Why Becomes How in advance, in the Johnny Booth a mixture of their ancestral sound My Chemical Romance and Sleep Token be assimilated – the dramatic gesture, of course, happening in the flow, also purposefully designed in terms of the dynamics of the album intensity.
Would less have sometimes been more? Yes. Either way, it doesn’t change the inevitable fact that Andrew Herman, Ryan Strong, Adam Halpern, Nick Martell and Scott Owens have finally arrived in the premier league – let the hype begin!
Moments Elsewhere by Johnny Booth
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