So Hideous - None But a Pure Heart Can Sing

Angry Metal Guy

You can imagine why New York City’s So Hideous changed its name. Its former moniker, So Hideous, My Love, reflects the sort of melodrama pervades its first offering To Clasp a Fallen Wish with Broken Fingers. It ended up being post-rock/screamo Envy worship – if Envy were more emo. Thereafter, the masterminds behind the project, the Cruz brothers, dropped the second half of the name and amped up the ugly. Last Poem/First Light offered a step in the right direction, while opus magnum Laurestine tackled things with even more grace, taking a page from Mono‘s handbook and releasing a full-length with a thirty-piece orchestra. In spite of its magnificent scope, haunting tones, and cinematic quality, there was always something missing. Will the first release in six years, None But a Pure Heart Can Sing fill that So Hideous-shaped hole?

So Hideous has always tackled its albums with a gossamer touch, claiming blackened hardcore but sounding more like screamo in the ilk of Pianos Become the Teeth and Envy. What makes the new approach intriguing is that the Cruz brothers recruited the rhythm section of mathcore’s The Number Twelve Looks Like You in bassist DJ Scully and drummer Michael Kadnar. Acknowledging the project’s crystalline catalog while emphasizing a more rhythmic attack with its new blood and The Dillinger Escape Plan guitarist Kevin Antreassian mixing and mastering, None But a Pure Heart Can Sing offers more violence than its title suggests, although it’s tragically hindered by jarring inconsistencies.

None But a Pure Heart Can Sing by So Hideous

While recorded with a small ensemble of strings, So Hideous‘ “less is more” approach is better, as its orchestral assets are far more balanced. Recalling Underoath‘s Ø (Disambiguation) album with atmospherics undergirded by chaotic percussion, the Cruz brothers have graduated beyond the confines of pretty-sounding hardcore. Their newest is an album chock-full of ideas – from the free-jazz sax spazzes of “The Emerald Pearl” to the colossal post-metal riffs that morph into emotive piano progressions and orchestral overtures in “Intermezzo” or the placid orchestral passages amid frantic blackened hardcore explosions in eleven-minute epic “Motorik Visage” – None But a Pure Heart Can Sing is a commentary on disintegration. Each track begins with pristine and crystalline precision that is thereafter compromised thanks to the erratic rhythm section that can’t let old habits die hard. While it’s not a violent upending as it potentially could be, it’s nonetheless an intriguing structure.

This leads to the issue of the album at large: it doesn’t necessarily feel like an album, but rather a compilation. Strange tricks are relegated to individual tracks, and other than their disintegrative qualities, there’s very little that ties them together. Christopher Cruz’s vocals and post-y flavors are largely the only consistency across None But a Pure Heart Can Sing, putting it a step behind Laurestine. What’s also endlessly frustrating about So Hideous, though, is that the project’s decade-long existence, reflected in this album’s scatterbrained approach, is bumpy. While Laurestine felt in many ways an actualization, it never felt fully fleshed out to create the impact it was so clearly capable of. In this way, I suppose I was hoping for the next step in the act’s evolution, but its wayward and indecisive ways once again became its own stumbling block. Similarly still to post-rock giant Mono, the act’s proclivity for theatrics can override songwriting – while they certainly have interesting elements of their sound, they continue to lack the chops to combine them consistently. While epic “Motorik Visage” is ambitious, for example, its passages feel awkwardly stitched together with frantic restlessness instead of patient fleshing and does not flow into emotive closer “From Now (Till the Time We’re Still).”

None But a Pure Heart Can Sing is a wild ride and a springboard for success from a band who has always missed it by that much. While So Hideous offers some of the most tantalizing ideas on this album than they have their entire career, fusing crystalline atmospherics with mathy chaos, they sacrifice their clarity and consistency in the process. The most damning thing about this album is its compilation feel and limp songwriting – songs have little in common with each other and admirable ideas don’t feel revelatory thanks to impatient pacing and awkward stitching. While None But a Pure Heart Can Sing offers plenty of potential, it also shows the So Hideous of now is too scatterbrained and impatient to make an impact.

Rating: 2.0/5.0
DR: 5 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Silent Pendulum Records
Websites: sohideous.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/sohideous
Releases Worldwide: December 3rd, 2021

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