1/5 stars
Western Australia’s I Am Zero have managed the oddly admirable feat of sewing the cadaver of nu-metal with brain-numbingly ubiquitous metalcore, with their debut EP Darksky featuring five tracks of this Frankenstein-esque abomination. So how does it sound?
Well, ‘Until The Sky Falls’ features the prominent tired trope of screaming and singing, but with the added punishment of rapping. There’s also the overbearing and completely predictable drop-tuned, half-time groovy sections, which prove that there’s common ground between these two nadirs of modern metal.
I Am Zero attempt to sound like a metalcore Linkin Park in parts, too. The openings of ‘Until The Sky Falls’ and ‘The Winter Sun’ sound like something straight off Meteora, with their soft, high-pitched, building piano chords underlying singing about teenage hardship. On the topic of lyrics, they too bring further pain. In ‘Until The Sky Falls’, the guitarist sings in a sombre moment where words stick out like sore thumbs: “And this time, in this moment, I will not trust myself”. There’s nothing like a platitude and tautology to really get you moshing.
It’s hard to explain the existence of this album other than part of a conspiracy to sell cochlear implants to permanently damaged ears.
