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Bury Your Dead: Beauty and the Breakdown Label: Victory Records Released: 2006

“We could just get up there and shred or have a good time. We choose to have a good time” – Bury Your Dead, 2006

"As a band, we feel this record is the equivalent to Dr. Dre's The Chronic.” – Bury Your Dead guitarist Slim B., via Wikipedia.org.

Bury Your Dead resides in a habitat entitled “moshcore,” which can be summed up as bad heavy music aimed at teenagers who ask for nothing more than down-tuned thumping. Those with lyrical skills and musicianship need not apply. The genre exists for its breakdowns, but it also begs this question: “Why listen to crappy ‘mosh’ music when there’s plenty of other talented ‘mosh’-worthy bands out there?”

The press notes paint Bury Your Dead as a band that’s just out there to have a good time. Somehow, they gained a following on the second stage of Ozzfest in 2005, and are even managed by Killswitch Engage’s Howard Jones. Their 2004 release, Cover Your Tracks, featured songs all named after Tom Cruise movies. Beauty and the Breakdown’s eleven cringe-worthy tracks are all named after fairy tales. These guys are a riot! I suppose it works to their advantage to be “fun” as a way to excuse their pedestrian, awful music.

As fun and “ferocious” as they may be, their music makes me want to jump into a pit of glass shards. The opening track, “House of Straw,” actually gets off to a decent start, but once vocalist Mat Bruso starts his Slipknot-esque growling/burping, the jig is up. Every song is loaded with sloppy guitar work that even a one-year student could play in his sleep, accompanied by a dizzying bass drum kick that gets monotonous by track three (that would be “The Poison Apple” for you fairy tale freaks out there). I will confess to sort of liking “Mirror, Mirror…,” but that’s akin to saying you “kind of” like “Popular” by Nada Surf. You only listen to it through headphones late at night – usually while drunk.

I thought moshcore had died with Limp Bizkit, but evidently not. Quality American metal is in large supply right now, so one would have to jump through hoops to justify the purchase of this waste of natural resources. If this is Bury Your Dead’s The Chronic, I can at least use the excuse that I’ve heard the best music they’ll ever produce the next time one of their discs drops on my doorstep.