There is no way the album title is meant to foreshadow what’s on the coming horizon. However, Amongst The Low And Empty (Century Media Records) accurately describes Signs Of The Swarm’s newest release. Lacking in ingenuity or inspiration, the deathcore purveyors recycle a small handful of techniques – over-exaggerated marble mouth, sparsely timed drum hits – to muster a record that has value as something intense and heavy, but decidedly not something ground-breaking by any means.

David Simonich seemingly recorded most of the vocal tracks with a discarded avocado pit lodged into his mouth. I understand they are far from the first or last band to use this animalistic trope, but maybe take your foot off the brake, just a bit? With nonsensically bland lyrics like, “We are serpents drowning in a sea of serpents”, the redeeming qualities are few and far between. ‘Faces Without Names’ just as easily could have been titled ‘Song Without Character’ due to its stunting verbosity. 

The requisite off-the-rails drumming features prominently here, but give me a rudimentary deathcore song that doesn’t. There is some substance found in the form of ‘Dreamkiller.’ A hint of clean vocals towards the end melds together nicely alongside the sturdy rhythm section. Additionally, ‘Shackles Like Talons’ is a strong track, though hardly anything more than that.

As mentioned prior, Amongst The Low And Empty is nothing if not a loud, pugilistic, sonically startling album. But the group appears to still be bound by those very shackles from earlier. Whether it’s due to corporate greed from their label to quickly churn out more music, or SoTS’s decision to be as vanilla as possible, there’s constant begging for variety yet being stuck in a morass of mediocrity. There is much too much filler and painfully predictable moments. 

But hey, maybe the latter was the main goal before entering the studio. Like most horror movie fans, sometimes the tried and true are enough to latch on to, even when the themes are rehashed over and over again. After the sixth or seventh Saw movie, enough was enough. There are only so many different ways to torture someone. Not to say Amongst… is anything close to torture. It’s just a bland salad of already-heard deathcore.

Buy the album review: 

https://signsoftheswarm.com/ATLAE-preorders

6 / 10

MATT COOK