About to turn the corner
Having all the right ingredients doesn’t always lead to a great recipe. Most people simply don’t have the knowledge to put all those individual components together to make something truly special. Given, having good ingredients will get you pretty damn far in most pursuits, considering most people don’t even have that. Heart-Shaped Hell is an excellent showcase of something that adds up to less than the sum of its parts. The latest record from Sean Beavan, who has worked with industrial legends Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails, and his wife Juliette Beavan shows flashes of brilliance but falls flat on the whole.
“Self Inflicted Heartache” is more than a bit cliche and feels more like something from the mid-aughts rather than something from 2019. Though it’s hard to be surprised by cliches given the title of the album and nearly every track, particularly this one. To drive the point home we are “treated” to a chorus of “Hey, this is how I break, it’s my self-inflicted heartache. Hey, I’m a fuckin’ earthquake,” lyrics that do nothing but attempt to propel the painfully edgy aesthetic of this record forward. This starts the album off on the wrong foot from the get-go, making it tough to find the right groove for them to slot into.
The issues continue with clunky drum machines on “Supercrush” that distract from some genuinely interesting synths that teeter just outside of power electronics. Beyond the interesting synths, it must be said that lead singer Juliette Beavan has an excellent voice and fittingly manipulates it to stand alongside the woozy industrial sound palate that Sean Beavan provides.
The most offensive track on the album is “Bring It On” which features male vocals that would be best described as “belonging in a worship band.” While this is clearly the mandatory slow song, it’s jarring and completely removes the listener from the flow of the record, making for a confusing left turn in an album that already struggled to remain engaging.
After the detour, “Move With Me” does begin to pull the album back on track with a crushing bit of sub-bass synth to kick off the long track. This track too stands out from the rest of the album, but unlike “Bring It On” it stands out for all the right reasons. Up until around the two-minute mark the song is startlingly avant-garde, bordering on dark ambient. Before now the record had largely been content to rehash industrial and hard rock cliches from the prior decade, and sure, once the vocals enter at 2:30 it becomes less interesting, but the track is still far more enjoyable than previous cuts. In fact, the vocals on this are delightfully reminiscent of someone like Sade and display an intoxicating trip-hop quality that forces the listener into a deep trance. If the whole record were like this it would receive a glowing recommendation, but even still, this is a diamond worth plucking from the rough.
Outside of “Bring It On” this is a pretty okay album. As noted earlier “Move With Me” is stellar, but feels more like an outlier on the opposite side of “Bring It On.” The rest of this album is met with a profound “meh” and will likely be forgotten. But there is hope in these forgotten spaces, elements that can be tinkered with and refined until they glow with their full potential. Until then, Heart-Shaped Hell is okay and should sate most fans of pop-industrial, but there’s a corner in the road ahead for 8mm. Here’s hoping that they make the turn.
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