XBXRX - Wars

So this is what So Many Dynamos and At The Drive-In sound like to my parents. I picked Wars up at Scotti’s in Summit, which has been historically slim pickings for metal and punk. I saw the Polyvinyl Records logo, so I bought it. I thought it would be some Somebody Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin-style indie pop. Reader, it is not indie pop. This is 2000s post-hardcore at its most grating and atonal.

There are plenty of stop-start changes and interesting technical patterns going on, but they’re not in service of anything except impenetrability. There are no breakdowns, no real mosh parts. It’s not progressive, it’s not propulsive, it’s not heavy, it’s not even all that mathy. It’s just chaotic. The vocals are stuck on the same shouty castrato note for the whole album. Bits of the top layer of silver have chipped off the edges of the disc, leaving it with an uncomfortable, ragged look. The graphic design as a whole is very “MySpace metalcore”. Reading through the lyrics on the inner page, I think that the harshness and the chaos is meant to mask the fact that they don’t have very much to say. I can’t say I’ll ever want to listen to this CD again.

Wars by XBXRX is a bad album, and I don’t like it.