Band:	Beartooth
Album:	Below
Style:	Post-Hardcore, Alternative rock
Release date:	June 2021

01. Below
02. Devastation
03. The Past Is Dead
04. Fed Up
05. Dominate
06. No Return
07. Phantom Pain
08. Skin
09. Hell Of It
10. I Won't Give It Up
11. The Answer
12. The Last Riff

Sugary sweet.

Hardcore-cum-metalcore crew Beartooth have been quietly and confidently plugging away at their music for nearly a decade now, rising up the ranks in the metalcore world that has receded from its 00's heyday. The band's fourth effort Below continues to scratch the itch between hardcore, metalcore and rock and will make sceptics concede that the band have purpose being the plastic, that is, to become a guilty pleasure rather than something to brush off.

While it would be easy to dismiss the band as merely the next in the long line of commercial fodder, Below still has some, ahem, teeth. Tracks like "Devastation", "Dominate" and "Hell Of It" turn things up to ten and let rip, giving listeners a shot of adrenaline that punctuates the album perfectly. Added to this is how the band can craft a hell of a catchy hook, with "The Past Is Dead" and "Phantom Pain" finding a home in your head without you noticing.

Main man Shomo once again shines, as his vocal performance is one of the more overlooked in the genre, handling both clean and unclean vocals with apparent equal ease. The opening title track and "Devastation" show this contrast straight out of the gate and open the album on a high note; if these tracks are merely vehicles for his voice, then they must get a lot of mileage out of them. The flipside to this is that the band are somewhat constrained by the confines of the song and are never really able to stretch themselves musically, with no one aside from Shomo pushing themselves; as a result, the other members don't leave a mark on you. It would have been good to hear a solo or extended bridge instead of a breakdown at some point during the record, but this doesn't happen.

The elephant in the room is that this album has half a foot in the world in metal and a foot and a half in the pop rock world, with tracks like "Skin" and "I Won't Give It Up" defanged and lacking any sharp edges so as not to graze any skin. While this doesn't automatically make these bad songs, it does mean that on a site called Metal Storm it might not find as many fans as they otherwise would, with "The Answer" straying furthest from the world of metal and well into the world of Shinedown rock.

Below is an album that outstays its welcome, and one that could do with finishing earlier for its own good; "The Hell Of It" is the last hurrah before the album bottoms out, with the closing track "The Last Riff" sounding like the bottom of the barrel being scraped rather than the end of an album, with its apparent lack of purpose beyond stitching together a bunch of dissonant bog-standard stoner riffs.

While Below will not leave a lasting impression as a musical statement, it doesn't detract from the fact it is a fun listen when it hits its stride and one that is enjoyable when it hits, though one that is a fish out of water here.