Clearly the moratorium on garbage influencer-bait is working like gangbusters…
Seriously, though—do we not have enough of these yet? Has pop-metal still somehow not reached its saturation point? sace6 might present differently on paper, but they congeal into the same junk as all the others. Here’s an act prizing their fusion of R&B and alt-metal, territory once controlled by Issues who’d go on to be one of the most dynamic bands in the scene. sace6, on the other hand, sound as though their only frames of reference for ‘alternative’ music are Chase Atlantic and Sleep Token. The former provide their dozy insipidity; the latter, a numbing, heavy-for-heaviness’s-sake approach to metal that’s more like a plugged-in preset.
It’s a recipe for terminal boredom, almost for the entire duration. Exceptions are exhaustive to an insane degree; it really is that easy to pluck out the ungestated kernels of what actually works. In the case of uneven and its inexplicable touch upon stark, atmospheric screamo, it might even be by accident. However, there’s a nocturnal knock to nepenthe that’s quite good with no qualifiers, the closest thing to a genuine highlight on here.
Past that are the dregs of creativity itself. sace6 will try to hide it with vocab words as song titles to appear more worldly and high-minded, but it doesn’t work. Just Googling the definitions of ‘basorexia’ or ‘fabulist’ is enough to put the pieces together, where this is yet another musing on a toxic relationship and the allure therein. Of course it is; it’s what all of these are, and do you really expect sace6 to be ones who shake it up?
If anything, they’re preaching to the choir more than anyone, as there’s no way to enjoy this unless your musical diet is a constant dose of oversold whinging with no end goal in sight. Swap out frontman sace. with any other marginally-fluid pop-metaller, and not one thing changes. He’s a vocaloid on this thing, essentially, able to grasp the shape of emotion without feeling even remotely buyable in his conveyance of it. Want the most damning consequence of that? He’s pitted against jxdn on reverie, and you can barely tell the two apart. When you’re almost indistinguishable from Anonymity Incarnate, you need to have a word with yourself.
That leaves the music to bounce brutalist back and good luck saying that with a straight face. It’s as hollow as you’d expect, produced within an inch of its life to where you could reasonably presume a human hand never touched an instrument in its creation. Yes, it can be ‘heavy’, but you’ll never find yourself affected by it. Whenever there is fealty paid to metal, it couldn’t feel more perfunctory, as guitars come down like lead slabs but dissipate with a whimper. There’s nothing mobile or dynamic about how these songs are arranged, the crowning example of that being fabulist and its full tilt into metalcore that gallumphs by, impossibly dispirited. As for the R&B side, it’s better insofar as sace6’s version of it is more difficult to screw up. It’s the sort of dour, monochrome miasma that a lot of metalcore isn’t far from embracing as is, naturally with no real variety to speak of. Put both together and it’s like an EMP for the concept of vitality and musical warmth.
What boggles the mind most is how basic brutalist really is. Seemingly, sace6 can’t grasp the idea that purposely dreary music can have more going on besides that, and instead decide that a clumsy graft-job is fine enough. There’s no real depth to what’s been created here, be that in composition, writing or delivery. It’s style over substance to a T, designed for no other reason that to trigger a Pavlovian response in the crowd who somehow want more of this. At least it knows what it’s good for, then—being the soundtrack to a husk of an ‘influencer’, gormlessly pointing to sace6’s name as recommendation, knowing that their audience will gobble it up because it sounds like everything else they consume. Horrid.
For fans of: watching other people soyface at the most mid metalcore ever
‘brutalist’ by sace6 is released on 8th May on Sumerian Records.
Words by Luke Nuttall
