Architects “The Sky, the Earth & All Between”

It’s a sad fact that most bands don’t have the staying power that as fans, we’d like them to have. Whether it be a drastic change in direction, disbanding, an unfortunate event, or just fading away unannounced into obscurity, it’s just a reality of all walks of life, especially in the creative space (and pro sports for obvious reasons). But not for Architects! A whopping ELEVEN LPs in, the Brighton favorites deliver yet another slab of metalcore, continuing to push the genre in their favor and in a relatively new, but familiar direction. There’s a lot to chew here, and easy to hate, and while it will never be close to my personal favorite “Hollow Crown,” or even the one that caught me back in later on “All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us,” there’s some interesting auditory exploration happening here. While it’s obvious Jordan Fish pumped the album full of what Bring Me The Horizon does best, what’s wrong with a little more of the good stuff? Sure, the lyrics may be cliche here and there, but as a grown man who got into this band almost fifteen years ago, this is much better than what happened to Metallica fifteen years after say, the Black Album came out. If you compare the trajectory of the greatest bands of all time and measure their continuity from that perspective, you have to appreciate what the band has done here.