Cancer Bats – Bear, Mayors, Scraps & Bones

• 19th Apr 2010

What can one say about the Cancer Bats other than ‘RAAAAARRRRRGGHHHHHHH’, perhaps? Cancer Bats do pretty much what they say on the tin, offering angry, dark, overdrive, distortion-ridden pure noise, so if you fancy a night in with furious, throaty screeching blaring in the background then these are right up your street.

Bears, Mayors, Scraps & Bones offers very little which deviates from generic heavy metal, but without the often highly impressive guitar work. In the whole album there isn’t anything which could be described as a solo, and really, the only variation between the songs comes from the tempo. There is a distinct lack of musical variety which leaves Bears, Mayors… lagging far behind such metal masterpieces as Trivium’s Ascendancy.

Also unlike some of its metal contemporaries, Bears, Mayors… barely even attempts any layering or variation of levels; my PC deciding to overlap two tracks of its own accord sadly caused minimal disruption to the song I had been listening to, and indeed it took some time to notice that two songs were playing at once.

It just isn’t very impressive, even for an album which is clearly attempting to run on the same vein throughout. One exception is ‘Raised Light’, the album’s longest song and its most melodic. Second from the end, it injects the variation which was long-since thought to be void from this largely mediocre, disappointing album.