Ice Nine Kills - Welcome to Horrorwood: The Silver Scream 2 album review

Massachusetts based metalcore outfit Ice Nine Kills have released Welcome to Horrorwood, their sixth record overall as well as the sequel to 2018’s The Silver Scream. The idea and concept here being that each song on both records is written around a certain horror film. Now, this band has gotten a pretty even divide between praise from fans for their campy, fun presentation and overall coherent tight metalcore as well as flack from the Metal Sucks crowd complaining about the band’s overall gimmick. I, personally, fall somewhere in between these two crowds. I am all for conceptual bands especially in a genre that can get so drap and repetitive that most of the time I can’t get myself to listen to it, nevermind cover it, but I think there’s a lot to nitpick out here.

I will start with the most low hanging fruit here, the lyricism is so poor. I understand the desire to represent a film’s plot line in a song but I think there are more subtle ways to get what you’re trying to tell across than;

It’s underneath our skin, no medicine can stop the bleeding. Far from all we know, we’re caught without a prayer, this is a fever.”

Taken from “A Rash Decision” based around Cabin Fever a passage that sounds like it was taken from a high schooler’s Halloween English assignment. Hand-in-hand with the lyrics are those song titles. Every single name of a track is some dreadful pun that sounds less horror movie tagline and more children’s cereal. I remember how much of a laugh I got out of “Assault and Batteries” when that was a single. There are plenty of bands who have done the horror movie lyrics and titles, see Cannibal Corpse, see Alesana, who didn’t need to do this weird elementary style of wording to see success.

Something that sometimes the lyrics are at fault for is completely taking you out of the record with just how campy they can be, though they’re far from the only culprit. There are times on the record where the most immersion breaking element is the sound scaping itself. There are the sound effects used in various points in the record that would be found in a b-movie slasher like the sound of suspense that clashes so much with a breakdown you just start to give up on it. Then there’s the narrative based ambiance like a newscaster speaking and making an otherwise good track in “Assault and Batteries” more or less un-revisitable because it feels like slogging through the intro of a YouTube video when all you wanted to do was headbang.

That narrative is my next gripe with the record. I feel as if the throughline of front man Spencer Charnas being all of these killers in a series of “tapes” isn’t a huge crime necessarily as more effective storytelling has been used in actual film. However that very narrative caused the band to include that God-Awful album intro. In it a narrator tells us that this is a series of lost tapes too gruesome to exist, you know the drill, but it also tells us that Charnas is wanted for killing his real life fiance. I don’t know why anyone would want that as even a suggestion of their character, even if used as a theme for your horror-based metalcore record, in some ways that makes the thought even more messy. I think if Charnas really needed to say “hey, I’m a killer!” He could take a quick lesson from guys on social media calling themselves the Joker. The words on the intro aside, it completely fails to transition into the title track and first real song, I think the album would be better off with this first forty-two seconds shaved off.

The crown jewel of it all is the record’s first single. Entitled “Hip to be Scared,” the track represents American Psycho. Don’t worry though, if you forget that at any point the track will remind you just about every ten seconds or so by shoe-horning a line or reenactment of a scene from the film. They even cut to a Huey Lewis and the News style section and attempt to do a sketch where Charnas asks his about to be victim if he likes Ice Nine Kills or not before explaining how the band wasn’t as good in the pre-Silver Scream interaction, you know, when people who could disagree with him were in the band. Then Charnas calls his band a “cut above the rest” as a mosh call, which is cheesy but I would just about forgive it if he didn’t have the music pause as if waiting for you to laugh at his bad joke. It has possibly the least subtle lyricism of the whole record. It is draining how uncreative this is, see that entire first verse if you’d like an example. There is a feature from Papa Roach’s Jacoby Shaddix though if you sneeze you’ll likely miss his one line, which feels like a slight as the other features on the record are pretty well utilized.

I think the most frustrating part of this entire record is that putting aside the points I made above there is good songwriting present on a lot of this. Songs like the title track, “Take Your Pick” and some select others are genuinely good metalcore. Even “Hip to be Scared” has some shining moments sonically but just about every good moment can be taken from you in a flash of a knife. I think Ice Nine Kills is still a good band but overall I don’t think the appeal of their parody lyricism and disrupting of their own songwriting will have a lasting staying power and I’m really hoping for no more sequels on this little series.