Try to Enjoy It

Despite my predilection for metal, my experiences with melodic punk rock have generally been positive ones. The humble unpretentiousness of the genre's sound, coupled with its heavy power chords, results in a vibe that is almost utterly unlike metal but still heavy enough to view with some affection. The latest offering from Copenhagen's Big Mess, Try to Enjoy It, falls into that category. The album's emotional vocal delivery, which sounds as if it is ripped straight from The Cure's Robert Smith, is not my favorite, but it fits. Most of the tunes are straightforward, mid-tempo pieces with pretty, power-chord-driven melodies and a somewhat depressive appearance; this is a punk band whose mood, just as the lyrics in Counting on You say, isn't angry -- just sad. The distortion is a minimalistic overdrive which sounds decent on all the tracks, but works best on faster tracks such as Bridesmaid, or Montage Feeling, a fast-paced number changing chords in double time. The opposite is true on the slower tracks; the tightness Big Mess is capable of drops into slack beats and Latin-style horns, but the vocals' emotion on songs like 2 of U or Stay With Ur Friends combine with the slow speed to make these ones a little too sad and pathos-filled for most metal listeners to be willing to put up with. Alleviating this tendency is the band's ability to make a decent, listenable tune; even when the vocals are at their most grating, the melody is at least interesting. We get a reasonably decent melodic punk release in the form of Try to Enjoy It, in which the title's exhortation is fairly easy for most listeners to accomplish. Listeners to post-punk of the 80s or emo of the 90s will probably be more interested in this than those who prefer styles with a closer relationship to metal. Bandcamp: https://bigmessdk.bandcamp.com/album/try-to-enjoy-it.