The best way to describe Bring Me the Horizon’s sixth album is “occasionally interesting.” “amo” fails to deliver anything that listeners haven’t heard before as the band waters down its instrumentals with simplified chord progressions and way too many synthesizers. Any meaning behind the lyrics has been replaced with the redundant words that make up every angsty love song. Thanks to these components, Bring Me The Horizon has created something purely mediocre.
When the band initially switched to a more mainstream sound on their previous album, they were able to maintain the complexity of their metal sound, but in “amo,” the only sound that makes an impression is Lee Malia’s guitar playing. I’ll give it to them, Malia still kills it (even if he only gets two solos).
Perhaps “amo” is the right album for listeners who are really mad at their ex, as that’s essentially what it’s about. Drummer Matt Nicholls took the lead on the writing process this time around and his influence definitely shows, as the boundary-pushing poetry of the band’s past is almost completely gone. I say “almost” because a few black-sheep songs cut deep. “Wonderful Life” and the album’s closing track, “I Don’t Know What to Say,” cover themes of outlasting depression and thoughts of suicide. These exceptional songs honestly deserve to be separated from the rest of the album.
This album suffers most greatly from repetitiveness. Most songs are taken up almost entirely by their choruses, so the same phrases are spewed over and over again. For example, “In the Dark” only has four lines in its verses, yet five lines in its pre-chorus, followed by a chorus composed of nine lines. Of course, the backing instrumentals repeat along with the lyrics, so the listener hear essentially the same thing for three minutes with each song. This seldom works to the band’s benefit, but it at least makes something catchy with “Taste of Your Own Medicine.”
“amo,” in the end, is a forgettable album that may have a single that’ll stick with a listener for a while, but then it will fade out too. For those looking for a good execution of a hard rock band moving toward a mainstream synthetic sound, don’t look in the direction of “amo.” Look at Falling in Reverse or Thirty Seconds to Mars instead, as they don’t throw away any of their pre-existing talent. I wish I could say the same for Bring Me the Horizon.
