A Prelude to Our Demise
3 Mile Scream is like a pitbull with all of its teeth removed. On the surface, it looks like a menacing beast, but when you examine it, you realize its weakness. The proceedings are kicked off by “Prelude”, which is simply a piano intro. “Mourning the Lost” starts off with a prolonged yell and then goes on to cram so many sub-genres into it that I nearly lost count. There’s some brief forays into blastbeats, black metal screeching, and then the chorus is sung cleanly, with the singer sounding like Ian Watkins of Lostprophets. He then alternates to a death metal grunt. “Forced Entry” has clean vocals that resemble Warrel Dane of Nevermore, minus the impressive range, and it closes with a generic breakdown.
“Our Blackened Sun” features generic breakdown #2, which gets led into by a wimpy spoken vocal. “Dare to Question” has a solo (!) and a Slayer riff in the bridge leads back into another Lostprophets chorus. “Confession” has Into Eternity-like vocals and seems to be a showcase for the drummer to load up on fills while the guitars kind of just plug away, minding their own business. The breakdown comes in at the end just like the metalcore script insists. Another example of a wussy spoken vocal leading into a breakdown comes yet again in “What Once Was”; this technique is a staple in the hardcore and metalcore scenes, but here it just sounds like a schoolyard bully making demands. The band gets their anti-corporation fix in (is it a mandate that every band has to do this these days?) on “Crippled Nation” with the lines: “All you capitalist pigs, go stew in the pen you call your country club with all the other swine that’ll screw us over for at least a dollar”. UGH. So let’s re-cap: they have nu-metal vocals in all of the choruses and some of the verses, an occasional death growl and blastbeat, metalcore breakdowns, and a smidgen of black metal screams. If their influences weren’t so obvious, maybe this would be more bearable.
