So, here’s the new Frontierer. I’ll cut it as is right out of the gate – it’s a disappointment. I’ve seen the backlash at people criticizing the record, but they’re few in between and most seem to praise it to high heaven, which…is honestly mystifying to me – but – to each his own.
I’ll level with all of you, it’s not a bad record. It just feels superfluous/redundant. I mean, first of all, “Heirloom” literally takes the churning riff from “Tumoric” and just swaps out some parts with more electronically chaotic ones. To me that’s literally an effortless excuse for an album opener. Don’t get me wrong I really dig “Tumoric” and it’s by far one of my favorite Frontierer tunes, but to do this kind of a lazy rehash doesn’t fly.
From there up to “LK WX” there’s basically nothing noteworthy. Yeah, you heard that right. It all just sounds like Unloved outtakes and/or B-sides. Extremely generic permutations revolving around the same kind of riff structures and breakdowns. I was going to say something about melody, but who are we kidding, there’s nothing like that in there. “LK WX” has a very nice edge to it and it’s a legitimately good track, packing heavy punches and boasting something of a narrative flow to it, with a nice dynamic working in its favor. Then we wade through some more of the same up to “Stereopticon” which is an absolute banger. It’s probably the only song that uses the same recipe as the rest but it manages to really stand out. It has a very nasty and hypnotic groove going for it and Kapper’s delivery coils around it very well. Speaking of, Chad Kapper is probably the saving grace of the band at this point as he’s an absolute monster of a vocalist.
The whole wall-of-sound approach is quite poorly executed. We loved it on Orange Mathematics and The Collapse because absolutely no one did mathcore like that. I gave Unloved a pass for using the same gimmick and improving nothing since it was only their 2nd record but Oxidized is going to get the lion’s share of the punches for not even recycling, but straight up copying the approach with basically nothing to show for in terms of progress. Production is very over compressed and you still can’t hear any cymbals, which makes you wonder why the band even bothered recording them (if they did). I honestly can’t even tell how many guitars/basses are there. It just sounds like there's a heavily processed 8 string going absolutely ham on the low E string. By processed I of course mean that it’s plugged into a Digitech Whammy which is stuck on minus (or plus) 2 octaves all the time.
Just to clarify, if Oxidized came out in 2018 instead of Unloved, and then Unloved came out this year instead of Oxidized, I could write practically the same review and just say that “Bomb Gnasher” is the standout and call it a day. So, while we’re still on this merciless-slaughter-wall-of-sound thing, I have the ‘in-a-nutshell’ version too. Just listen to “Glacial Plasma” and that’s Oxidized in 3 and a half minutes. It almost feels like white noise when you mow through the record, so imagine how it feels after the dozen-or-so listens I drudged through.
I’m definitely going to tax Oxidized for going way over the top with the high-pitched guitar nonsense, attempting to appropriate Car Bomb’s acrobatics, albeit with none of the success or good taste. It just becomes annoying screeching at a certain point. Sure, you could make the case for Oxidized that it’s purposefully relentless like this, so it just bludgeons you into submission in the vein of bands like Endon or Full of Hell or Vessel of Iniquity. To which I’d say that, yes, that’s a fair point, but Oxidized has zero authenticity when you hold it up to the band’s previous releases, so that argument sort of crumbles.
Because I don’t like bashing things or being negative, generally speaking (with notable exceptions like this) I’ll end this review on a positive note, just as the record ends with something good. The latter part of “/ Hope” is very cool. I was honestly quite surprised by it and it definitely caught me off guard. I also saw myself legitimately wishing for a Frontierer which is like that, whatever *that* is. Maybe a more post-hardcore oriented kind of mathcore with electronically driven soundscapes? Hopefully (pun intended) the next album follows in the footsteps of “/ Hope”.
