Arbiter, Joe

10... 9... 8... 7...

Strapped in, facing the heavens, eyes closed, sweating slightly, quite nervous. I don't think there's anything wrong with screaming vocals. I used to make fun of them as a young teen, because my friends liked bands like Hopesfall. Post-hardcore, the bands with loud walls of guitar sounds, and vocals that swung between quasi-melodic crooning and harsh, cathartic screaming. That last adjective is subjective; throat-shredding can be cathartic if that's your thing.

6... 5... 4...

I will blink and then be shot toward the stars. I don't really know if this is my thing. I'm open to anything, but post-hardcore might be a tough nut to crack. There's a chance that this is a genre you need to get into when you're young, and if you do, then it'll stick with you. This isn't music for a thirty-something, giving it a chance for the first time. I'm not sure why that is.

3... 2... 1... LIFTOFF

A fireball explodes behind me, and the spacecraft fights gravity and leaves the ground, accelerating at a rapid clip.

3000 feet. We're going to be okay.

I tried everything to figure Arbiter out. I felt like Nathan Fielder as I paged through the Wikipedia article for Post-hardcore (apparently My Chemical Romance is post-hardcore; now THAT'S a band I can get behind (I can't decide if I'm being sarcastic)). Hopesfall, according to a Ctrl+F, did not make the cut for that article. Googling "what is the appeal of post-hardcore" didn't amass that many hits. This Bandwagon article got pretty defensive of the genre, but didn't really tell me why anyone likes it. I thought about hitting up my buddy Dave, who would absolutely be the guy to ask if this were 2009 and he still had his emo haircut, but he's married and clean-cut now, and into Elliott Smith and White Reaper, and in response to my question would probably just send me the infamous low-pixel video of a drunk shirtless teen Joe K*** making growling noises in a sarcastic approximation of a cliché post-hardcore "breakdown" verse. I warned you I used to make fun of this shit.

7000 feet. We're going to be okay.

I tried to do my usual thing—something that everyone should do at least once for every album, honestly—of reading along to the lyrics while listening, and I was sorry to see that most of the words read nicely but ultimately came off as hollow and rather meaningless. There's a vague space theme through the entirety of the album, which definitely adds to the overall expansive sounds that the band is going for. But for the most part, these read like lyrics from a teenager trying to be deep. I could see the band members getting a lot out of these lyrics because they wrote them; I can't see anyone else knowing what the fuck they mean without some extensive footnotes. Pick any song at random, and read the lyrics, and tell me that ain't true. Here, let's do, I dunno, "Tunguska"? Here ya go: "The clearest of my faults / More than anything at all / Personal austerity on / I'm the menace of my." The fuck? To be clear, I'm not saying that you need crystal clear and relatable lyrics in order to make a good album. I'm just saying that it usually helps, and Hopesfall does itself no favors in the obscure ambiguousness all over Arbiter.

13000 feet. We're going to be okay.

In a last ditch effort, I hopped into our Kia Sportage, just me, no wife or baby, and cranked this shit up, thinking maybe that would be the key to unlocking any sort of emotions I'm supposed to be feeling. Searching for the cathartic, in other words. I still felt nothing. There were glimpses, sure; like, I could maybe see some sort of emotion down the hall of mirrors. But mostly, it felt like I was sixteen again, rolling my eyes at the bullshit coming out of Dave's speakers as we drank beers in the parking lot behind the retirement home, wishing that it didn't seem like every song sounded like the same goddamn song.

27000 feet. We're going to be okay.

That's ultimately what it comes down to, I think. I don't hate Arbiter. There are no intense emotions whatsoever for me here. There's literally nothing that takes hold of me. Talking shit on cookie-monster vocals is so passé. Talking shit on sad boy screamers is so high school. I don't have the energy to say anything negative about this at all, and that's honestly what makes it so bad.

36000 feet. We're going to be okay.

My distaste for a few certain genres is an immovable object, and the obligations of Record Club are an unstoppable force. If this is your type of music, then consider me jealous of you, because I absolutely don't like listening to albums that do nothing for me. I do not like listening to Hopesfall, apparently. If you like this album, please send me some hate-mail, so I can feel something besides this numbing nothingness.

46000 feet. We're going to be okay. Maybe. I don't know. We're on the Challenger. Something pops, and my last thoughts are of the kids from the local H.A. Wallace Space Academy, bussed in to see our ascent toward the stars firsthand. The children have their necks craned upward and are witness to a bright expanding mass of light and sound. Then silence.

GRADE: 1 puke out of 5