Trend-hopping is never a subtle act. It's always blatantly obvious when a band is trying to capitalize on the current or next "big thing," but to hear it unfold before your ears is, evenmoreso, repulsive. I haven't heard the Hurt Process's Drive By Monologue, but the widespread synopsis is that the record was a poor watermark of its times, indulging in the same type of "screamo" wrongfully labelled by the mainstream media and its short-leashed outskirts. A Heartbeat Behind follows up that last full-length by little over a year, and already the band has hilariously jumped ship to dairy-alotted metalcore-pop, similar to the last effort from From Autumn To Ashes or labelmates Atreyu (notably, the latter), but a raise several notches on the groan scale.

Opener "Anchor" blasts out of the gates with metal riffs and screamed vocals, and, for a second, will lead you to think the band has taken a drastically harder turn to almost competent, still derivative metalcore. Only when the cheesy melodic singing comes into play are the band's true intentions revealed. Scattered amongst the record are more examples of unintentionally amusing efforts. Screams are both wailed, growled, and gargled, sometimes all at once. "Delicious 53" is arena metal at its finest, if there ever was such a thing, "The Night Before The Morning After" is a painfully pitiful, Medieval acoustic ditty, and "Reading Into It" sums things up with its string section that owes more to radio balladry than orchestral, Swedish metal saluting. The wail of "Taste the difference!" in "A Mind With Two Faces" sounds like the Darkness doing a jingle for a Pepsi ad.

The album art depicts a long-haired woman taking the heart from a man's chest in a form of smeared animation, but it's sort of fitting that the band recycled their own artwork in a different fashion, since, after all, the music is recycled too, just in a different fashion.

The real "hurt process?" Listening to this fucking record.

STREAM
Anchor

MP3
My Scandinavian Ride [clip]