By Night - A New Shape Of Desperation
By Night hail form Sweden and "A New Shape of Desperation" is their second full-length album. The promo bio pegs their sound as "a highly corrosive marriage of death, thrash and heavy-hitting hardcore," but would have done better to substitute the words "depressingly familiar" for "highly corrosive." Essentially, this CD is just further evidence that Sweden has finally bought into the whole American metalcore explosion, which is highly ironic considering that all American metalcore did in the first place was rip off 1990s Swedish melodic death metal bands like At The Gates and In Flames and add a bit of shouting and some eyeliner. If at any point in the last three years you've watched MTV2, been to a club night at Nottingham Rock City or bought an issue of "Metal Hammer," then you've heard everything By Night have to offer, and probably heard it done better and more memorably. "A New Shape of Desperation" is admirably free of keyboards and cleanly sung choruses, but in all other respects it's straight up metalcore will fewer frills than a fire in Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen's wardrobe and such a severe dearth of imagination that they directly quote Arch Enemy with the song title 'Dead Eyes See No Future'.
But it's "cold, sterile and machine-like," bleats that promo bio, and yes, I suppose it is, but then so is all metal nowadays. It's de rigeur for modern metal albums to sound like they were recorded in a desert, with lifeless triggered drums and a guitar sound as dry as a streptococcal throat, and acclaimed producer Christian Silver (The Crown, Impious, Beseech) certainly delivers the goods in that regard.
What the metal world doesn't need right now is yet another characterless band doing the rounds, hawking more of the same old stuff which has been clogging up the airwaves since Sharon Osbourne decided that metalcore was a viable money-spinner and added a clutch of these acts to the Ozzfest bill. It's certainly not what I need right now, either. I'm not suggesting that By Night are purposefully jumping on the tail end of a rapidly departing bandwagon with dollar signs in their eyes in an attempt to accumulate large piles of cash; I'm sure that their intentions are good, and that they passionately believe in what they are doing. But this album challenges nothing except your perception of how mediocre and generic a band can truly be.