Album Club 2019: Rolo Tomassi - Time Will Die and Love Will Bury It
 

Rolo Tomassi - Time Will Die and Love Will Bury It
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Club Rating: 5.83 out of 10

This could be a fun one. Let's duuuuu itttttttttttttt.

Thoughts: It starts off with a dreamy post-rock atmosphere, gets into some pretty standard post-hardcore where I could see exactly where each part of the song was going and there were absolutely no surprises, and then the music really ramps up--I mean, just gets so amazing--but fuck me those vocals. I'm just not going to be able to get over black metal vocals, I think. I keep trying, but something inside me hates it. Quite a cathartic album overall. The post-rock moments are spot-on. But this album taken all in all is not my thing. MB will love it.

Rating: 6/10

I didn't realize this was here. I'll listen and post my review later...

When a band incorporates many styles it’s very important there’s no big drop off in quality. Some of the parts with female vocals sound like what I consider “emo”. I love Jawbreaker and I like Jimmy Eat World, I’m not at all an emo hater. But with this band the melodic structure isn’t there and the female vocals are weak. On the other hand, the pure ambient and black metal parts are excellent. My take is a lot like Mord’s in that we both like some styles but can’t buy into the whole thing. What we like and don’t like are different but hey different strokes for different folks sort of like I’m sexually arroused by Dana Plato before her breast augmentation and Mord prefers the post-suicide Plato.

6/10

Extra heavy and harsh math rock/metalcore. A lot like Iwrestledabearonce, but feels more black metal and post rock than those guys, depending on the passage.

Some of the passages have some clever drum rhythms meshing with cold, hard guitar chords, and these parts tend to be the best bits. Mostly not into the softer bits. I'm all about melody oriented music and rarely listen to harsh sounding music, but that also means that I'm not gonna be easily impressed by some pretty sounding soft bits if the songwriting just isn't really there. And it kinda isn't, sadly.

So the heavy bits fare the best, but I find the vocalist to be a problem. She's capable of doing both a pretty, clean voice and harsh black metal screams, but for both approaches, she's rather one dimensional. There's basically no expressive range in any way within either vocal style for her, so she's basically mediocre at two very different things, which I guess is still impressive in some way. Any scream she does one moment sounds exactly like any scream she does at any other moment. Completely one dimensional - and the same goes for her clean vocals, sadly. It's basically that there's no subtlety and dimension to what she does. She has a good voice, but does not have the heart of an artist.

The distance between the best heavy bits of music and the rest makes this one hard to rate. I'm gonna go with a 4/10 since they're very competent. I just find their melodic compositions to be lacking a lot and their singer to put a rather disappointing damper on the album.

I chose this so my feelings will be biased, but here we go.

I'm not surprised this hasn't gone over well. I chose it specifically knowing a good deal of people won't care for it- it's either too experimental, or not experimental enough. There are too many heavy, harsh parts, or too many soft parts. It's got a lot going on.

That said, I LIKE all the stuff that's going on. I think that they successfully switch from soft ambient, to harsh blackened mathcore, to post-rock with pop sensibilities. They turn what could be an entirely unpleasant mess of genres into a beautiful fistful of spaghetti thrown at a wall. If that's your thing (and its mine), it will be wonderful. If you wish they'd just relax and stick to one thing, it will be a letdown.

This is a great album. It takes all the elements that made metalcore popular with teenagers in malls back in my teenage years and improves on it, making an album that is equally poppy and heavy.

I'm glad that everyone is giving it a shot, at least!

9/10

Yeah. It's not experimental at all. "Experimental" isn't a word that once crossed my mind while listening to this.

I was more talking about the average music listener, not really our crowd around here. It's mathcore so there's a level of avant garde that's baked into the genre- maybe only in the rhythms and time signatures, but still.

I'd say it's unlistenable for the average music listener.

Yeah, that's kinda my point. Harsh music is, by default, operating on a level of experimentalism. Tho this kind of music feels pretty normal to us here, it is beyond most folk.

just wait til you hear this

You don’t think the vocals are a little weak?

@ blarob

I enjoy the vocals. They're not like anything astounding or new or shocking, but they totally work for what the album is. In my opinion, anyway.

Ugh, that's definitely not what I'm saying. I'm just saying that for MOST people, harsh music of any kind is an immediate shutdown. For a minority of people, it is not.

I get what you're saying, that's just what it sounded like though lol.

I think it has to do with a lot of people not being exposed to much music outside of what's on the radio, so they just aren't accustomed to certain things if they hear it. Sometimes it can just be a matter of them not even being aware of its existence. I hadn't of heard any electronic music until I discovered Kraftwerk, deadmau5, and Orbital when I was a teenager and my mind was blown. It was foreign to me, yet it became my second favorite genre after metal.

Time Will Die is Rolo's least harsh album and a more shimmering continuation of the style on thee album before, but that one is way better. Probably the best one.

'Unsure, The Album', and not necessarily in the vein of being powerfully eclectic like a lot of albums with the 'math' tag. Moreso, Time Will Die shows mathcore band Rolo Tomassi at (supposedly) their most fragile, as they massively flaunt with emo and gothic rock influences that are abruptly transitioned into all across the album. This particular record seems to lean on what I call the 'Foo Fighters formula', wherein a band tries to be emotionally resonant by switching back and forth between melodic calmness and heavy brashness. Repeat this formula 10 times or so over and you have a full record, and lemme tell you does that formula get tedious after awhile. It doesn't help that the repetitious elements aren't exactly of the highest quality- the vocal performances from both Spences, male and female, are noticeably shallow particularly in the softer sections. There is little middle ground between their clean and screamed vocals, and it's either halfheartedly imitate Amy Lee or Greg Puciato. Even the good parts of the album, the blitzing mathcore sections, drop off about halfway through leaving almost the entire second half of the record as glorified gothic metal...and I cannot stand gothic metal.

In short, this record seems to feign complexity more than it actually presents it; the loud, melodramatic patches are taken WAY too seriously by the band and are about as corny as an After Forever record, and the more brutish mathcore elements that should bulk up the album are either too few-and-far-between to have an effect or are simply ill-conceived.

There's a neutral territory between halfbaked and overcooked, you just gotta find it.

4

Rolo Tomassi - Time Will Die and Love Will Bury It

Lively mathcore, melodically decent, at times (albeit briefly) experimental in a luxuriant sense. In a few jazzier moments I feel nostalgic twins for late 90's nu-jazz video game soundtracks. The heavier moments are the best aspect of their sonic architectural sensibilities, maybe because that aspect of them just seems more mature / developed overall. Kinda feels like that's where their "heart" is per-se.

My POV on bands with contrasting musical identities is that both should be distinctive or don't bother. Not everyone can be Opeth or Sigh or even Issues and do the multiple musical personalty disorder thing with finesse.

All that being said, I liked a lot more than I came in expecting. 'A Flood Of Light' is pretty solid and 'Alma Mater' carries it's various moods well without going into purely saccharine territory.

Next time these guys should bring in a jazzy horn section and alternative between happy hardcore and City Pop. That would certainly be legit in the innovation department.

6 out of 10

I didn't notice there was two vocalists. Plenty of bands have a singer that switches between singing and growling, so I just assumed. Plus I seem to remember from Rolo Tomassi music videos that there's just one vocalist, but I guess not.

Bands with female vocalists tend to focus on them almost entirely so it's not a surprise.

I don't believe in polls.

Get out of our clubhouse, chach.

You can just have a note ready to copy paste that goes:

"Sucks ass. Didn't listen."

It metal. Me like metal sometimes.

The current verdict overall is 5.83 out 10. I'll update this number if there are any stragglers who review this after today. :clap:

y'all just hate having fun

Anything I give over a 5 is basically "I like it" territory. Anything I give an 8 or above is usually something I really dig for one reason or another.

Eh, it's fine. I didn't think this would be a winner, but I thought it was worth a shot.

I guess I think of the scores 7-10 as "worth having on my CD shelves" material, which means most album club albums will probably get 6 or below, since I rarely hear anything here, that I actually want to add to my collection and actively listen to after the review is written. 4-6 still means I got something out of it, so they aren't entirely bad scores on my scale. I don't see the point in having half the scale being subdivisions of "this sucks", so it's only 1-3 that I think of as "not worth my time at all" territory.

Maybe it's my fault to expect Dillinger-esque music with that mathcore tag but it's just way too glitzy in sections for my taste. Reminds me a bit of Avatarium in the sense that they seem stuck in between contrasting attitudes (super melodic, commercial quasi-gothic **** and genuine dynamic metal).

8/10 or higher goes in my collection. 6/10 or 7/10 is respectable but not to my taste. I don't really consider anything below that.

This would have been a winner if it wasn't for the screaming vocals.

Agreed.

This would have been a winner if there weren't any vocals and they concentrated more on the instrumentation.

idk Eva Spence's (soft) vocals are one of the best things on this album.

This would have been a winner if it wasn't for the vocals.

This guy gets it.

Rolo Tomassi
Time Will Die and Love Will Bury It

Sorry this is late. Was busy all week. I listened to this today on the way down to a record store.

I dig this record. Blends a lot of different sounds together into what I thought was a coherent and synergetic mix of post rock ambiance and post hardcore screamo. Really enjoyed the instrumentation and I'm a sucker for female vocals juxtapositioned with some abrasive male vocals. It kicks in the right moments and the quieter parts don't feel forced. Reminds me of "The World is a Beautiful Place..." in parts while also being very unique in some of the more post hardcore moments. This type of record has always been right up my alley and I enjoyed it a lot.

8/10

****ing finally. Thank god for Exo.

Wait until you see the final average for my next album. I expect something like a 3.2/10.