Nine - It's Your Funeral
A mixture of hardcore and death metal? By golly, that's an original mix!. With so many bands going the -core route these days, with little to differentiate themselves with, Swedish band Nine and their new album 'It's Your Funeral' had to be something special to really impress me, unfortunately, they fail to rise above the stifling limitations of the metalcore genre and fail to really entertain.
To be frank, there is little variation between one track and another. Sure, riffs chance, lyrics change, but the styling and structure of each song is so similar that it all blends into one metalcore haze. Now, this wouldn't be a bad thing if one liked the genre, but when you don't it all just becomes insufferable after awhile. I could throw song titles and differences at you, but in the end it wouldn't mean much. The music is as you would expect: the lighter elements of death metal are combined with the structures and stylings of hardcore, there's nothing too ambitious added to this basic formula and little deviation from the norm. It's quite simply typical of the genre.
One big niggle though is the length of the album, with most of the tracks clocking in at the 3-minute mark what looks like a respectable track listing of ten tracks actually ends up being about 36 minutes. In an age where downloading, whether justified or not, is rife it is disappointing to see bands put out so little content and expect to be able to perform competitively. There's simply no motivation for the average punter, regardless of how interested they are in Nine's music, to actually go out and pay the full retail price for an album, which has the length of a glorified EP.
Overall then, this album is certainly not terrible, perhaps not even necessarily bad, but it doesn't add anything to a genre which is over-saturated with bands who are mostly doing the exact same thing as one another. Combining this with a disappointing playtime for an album, which will undoubtedly be sold at full price, makes 'It's Your Funeral' a rather unattractive purchase. Definitely one for the collectors and the hardcore only.