01. I. Collection Of Forgotten Dreams
02. Schizophrenia Legacy
03. Full Moon Guidance
04. Two-Headed Trout
05. Tears On Lambo Leather [feat. Adam Easterling]
06. Lemon
07. Body Horror For Birds [feat. 1st VOWS]
08. The Demon Of Unreality Limping Like A Dog
09. Idiot Temptation Force
10. Douchebag Safari
11. Distracted By The Mona Lisa
12. II. Opt Out
13. III. Country Song In Reverse [feat. low before the breeze]
What happens when tongue-in-cheek chaotic avant-garde mathcore gets even more conceptually ambitious?
I opened my review of the band’s previous album with “every self-respecting mathcore band should have their tongues at least occasionally firmly planted in their cheeks”, since Celebrity Therapist is an album that does feel somewhat in line with the legacy that bands like The Dillinger Escape Plan created, weaving their intensely heavy controlled chaos with tongue-in-cheek twists and humorous titles that created a pretty neat hyperactive listening experience. Though I did note that there’s still some work required in blending the “big choruses, breakneck riffing, and quirky randomness”. And apparently what The Callous Daoboys got from that is that they should go all in on all of them.
The first sign that I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven is of a different breed is the fact that the album is nearly an hour long, more than 20 minutes longer than Celebrity Therapist, which by mathcore standards is pretty insane. That makes more sense when the opening track makes the conceptual nature of the record pretty clear, with the spoken word presenting the album as if it were a collection in a museum three centuries away. The fact that said museum is presented as “The Museum of Failure” is very telling about the tongue-in-cheek and self-aware nature of the band, but even with that self-awareness there’s some self-aggrandizing in the presentation that does put a lot of expectations on an album being announced out of the gate as something museum-worthy and “historically important”.
Perhaps more important than framing the future museum concept, the presentation in the intro also contextualizes the music on the album as being created by “heartbreak, anguish, frustration, infidelity, loss, addiction, and suffering”, finding a pretty interesting meta way of introducing in the album itself stuff that’s usually reserved to the PR text. The Bandcamp text itself does offer even more context from Carson Pace, framing I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven as an album that he wanted to make for himself and that he could only make now within the snapshot of his 24-27 years of life, which makes this a more introspective and personal album, but I also can’t help but feel that the ambitious nature of the album feels like it wants to make some kind of statement.
Once the actual music starts it’s clear that The Callous Daoboys are going full-throttle on the various aspects of their sound they explored on their first two albums. Most of these are things that I can see being quite obnoxious for the average listener, so this is the kind of album that’s not for everyone. The melodic choruses sound even closer to early 00s MySpace emo ones, the spastic randomness feels even more spastic, but also the intensity and the heaviness also get pushed further, and something about the production gives the screaming and the riffing an increase in size. I personally find the melodic choruses a bigger hassle in getting used to compared to the randomness. Even if some moments feel like they’re using the randomness as too much of a gimmick (like the atmospheric drum & bass break on “Tears on Lambo Leather” or the grunts on “Idiot Temptation Force”), so not all of them hit the mark, it keeps an air of unpredictability that still remains even with further listens.
I can’t help but respect how much I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven bites. By all metrics, it should be more than The Callous Daoboys can chew, but it does show that they have a knack for making weird and quirky music catchy. As much as I didn’t initially gel with all the spastic moments or the overly melodic choruses, the way there elements flow on tracks like “Two-Headed Stout” is seriously impressive, and I don’t think it would’ve worked that well if the production didn’t make the heavy parts feel as heavy, or if vocalist Carson Pace didn’t push the heavier side of his vocals into growls as well as screams. It’s not just about how the heaviness works in contrast, “Lemon” doesn’t have a drop of metal in it, and it might be the track I’ll return to the most from this. Special attention should be given to the 11-minute long closing track, one that needed to be conceptually presented as “the long lost piece finally presented alongside the rest of the collection”, one preceded by another spoken word interlude warning the listeners of its contents. “Country Song In Reverse” feels like all of the album’s excess presented in a single track, from breakness mathcore madness, a moment channeling an autotuned Björk cover, and a more expansive and cinematic almost jazz-ish section with violins and saxophones.
I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven isn’t the disaster it could’ve been by biting too much. It can’t chew everything, but what it can chew ends up being an album that does at least partly justify why it presents itself the way that it does.
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Written on 30.05.2025 by
Doesn’t matter that much to me if you agree with me, as long as you checked the album out. |