Ahh, the scene, what wonders it has brought upon us. Without the scene, surely we'd be drowning in second-rate pop junk, crappy bands that are enthusiastically promoted by shady sensationalist music magazines, and we'd all be suffering from a general malaise when it comes to new and interesting things in rock music.

Wait, that is what's happening.

While the "scene" is hardly the only cause for this, it's not like it's actually done anything to stop the general decline of musical standards in the past fifteen years. What may originally have been a project to promote an alternative to big business domination of alternative rock has more or less become just another way for fat record company executives to make their balance sheets look good. It's not surprising that nothing decent has ever, ever come out of the scene, given that it consists about 95% of gullible teenagers, and 5% of clever businesspeople making a quick buck out of those gullible teenagers. Bring Me The Horizon is a product of the scene through and through, and true enough to form, it's a project built by enterprising businesspeople to make a quick buck through gullible middle-class teenagers.

"Count Your Blessings" is the second full-length release from this band, and it contains ten tracks of what is supposedly supposed to pass as "deathcore", a new genre that combines "metalcore" and death metal. Maybe I'm just getting old, and maybe it's just because I suspect that this trend of creating new genres ending in the word "core" is just an excuse for mediocrity ("Hey, we might be a lousy grindcore band, but we're a superb gibbetcore band!" ), but I really attempted to give this band a fair hearing and try to understand exactly what "deathcore" is about.

Evidently, "deathcore" involves lots of detachable fringes, men wearing girls' jeans, and sludgy riffwork. Leaving aside the questionable fashion choices of the band for a moment, just looking at the song titles on this album is instructive. Songs like Tell Slater Not to Wash His Dick and (I Used To Make Out With) Medusa show that the band really, really, really want to appear to be tough and hardcore. It's the first example a listener to this album will have of this band's main downfall; they want to appear so tough and hard-hitting that they overcompensate, and end up looking like a bunch of clueless kids trying to emulate the bigger boys.

The music itself is not much better than the song titles would indicate. The band do have the speed part of the equation down pretty well, but that's about it. Drummer Matt Nicholls could quite safely be replaced by a drum machine without any real impact on the music, and the guitarwork of Lee Malia and Curtis Ward is pretty uninspired, coming directly from the "detuned Slayer-esque" songbook, with pretty much zero actual inspiration or creativity on display. The constant prominent profanity is another indication of the band trying to appear tougher than they actually are, I don't mind an occasional "fuck" here and there, but Max Cavalera or Mikael Åkerfeldt sure as hell don't have to swear to sound scary.

To be perfectly fair though, one would have to mention the artwork that comes with this album. Conceived of and put together by vocalist Oliver Sykes, it's really quite good, and I get the feeling that Sykes could easily make a living as an artist. Despite this though, one wonders if perhaps this band isn't going down the wrong track, because I question how hardcore a band can be when it's fronted by a guy called "Oliver". In spite of his best efforts, this album pretty much falls flat upon its face, resulting in music that'll pretty much appeal only to kids who haven't yet picked up a Slayer or Opeth record yet. But then, that pretty much embodies what the "scene" is.