ALBUM REVIEW – “Reign of Terror” by Capture the Crown

Few music videos of the last few years have been as funny as the one for ‘You Call that a Knife? This is a Knife!’ by professional Australian trend-chasers Capture the Crown. The impossibly young-looking group spend four minutes in the School of Rock splayed-leg ‘power stance’, while their vocalist dances behind a dented box and gets soaked by an inexplicable torrent of water; the music, meanwhile, rips off early Asking Alexandria for all its worth, from the terrible faux-edgy lyrics to the cheesy electro synthesizers. Odious debut full-length ‘Til Death followed, the band’s name firmly established as a punch-line thanks to the complete lack of tact or maturity on display, encapsulated in the decision to name a song ‘#OIMATEWTF’.

A year and a half, the departure of a founding member and a label change later, the story resumes with second album Reign of Terror. The good news first- a small amount of progress has been made. For one, vocalist Jeffrey Wellfare has at least learned how to write a decent chorus without drenching himself in autotune, the hooks of ‘To Whom It May Concern’ and ‘Beating the Blade’ showing previously untapped depth of emotion and a nascent, if yet unpolished knack for creating catchy material. The bridge of the latter song even incorporates a nu metal influence that works surprisingly well. Acoustic ballad closer ‘Janina’ even shows that Capture the Crown can be grown-up when they want to be, even if it is clinically overproduced and laced with lyrical clichés.

Those two problems, are, however, only two drops in the ocean of reasons why Reign of Terror by no means represents absolution for this much-derided band. Put simply, this album has been released a hundred times before. Where before their sheer awfulness helped them stand out, now they have become so mediocre and so similar to every D+ band in the genre that they’ve rendered themselves entirely anonymous. The guitar work on far too much of this album – the title track intro the worst offender – solely involves hammering out open-note breakdowns; ‘Firestarter’ features gang chanting with no conviction in its delivery whatsoever, rendering it comical. Again and again moments where the vocals could save the grossly underwhelming music fall flat because the lyrics are so uninspired– naming a song ‘I Hate You’ is never and will never be a good idea, while ‘Red Light District’ rolls out “over and over”, “you brought this on yourself” and “I can’t do this without you” in the space of a few seconds.

In a mercifully brief 29 and a half minutes, Capture the Crown have created a half-hour exhibition of everything dull and overdone in metalcore in 2014. Where its predecessor was utterly juvenile and amusingly badly done, Reign of Terror is so inoffensive and on-trend it goes in one ear and out the other. Brief flashes of promise are gone almost as soon as they appear, and while anything would have been an improvement over the quasi-musical slice of tripe that made them (in)famous in the first place, there’s still far too little innovation or skill to convince the wider world that Capture the Crown’s career will be more than a reign of terror.

Rating: 3 / 10

Michael Bird

‘I Hate You’

‘Red Light District’