ALBUM REVIEW: I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven – The Callous Daoboys
In 2022, THE CALLOUS DAOBOYS upended mathcore with the mind-bending opus Celebrity Therapist that set a whole new benchmark for the genre. Their subsequent EP, God Smiles Upon The Callous Daoboys, showed them folding in more pop structures and hooks into their evolving palette. Neither of these fantastic records could truly prepare anyone for the subsequent leap forward that their third album I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven represents, as it moves even further beyond the boundaries of mathcore to fold in 2000s pop, emo, nu-metal and Wii Sports music (oh, yes) in a sprawling, hour-long journey into madness and the concept of what failure truly means.
Importantly, I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven is a concept album, with a museum guide to help navigate the Museum of Failure created within it. The throughline is rather simple – in 300 years, the album has been unearthed by the aforementioned museum for its collection of artworks regarded as failures, then asks the question, if it lasted this long and is immortalised, was it truly a failure? Vocalist and mastermind Carson Pace has also described it as his most personal album, a collection of every emotion felt over three years of life.
It’s also a fearless, adventurous, and ultimately brilliant success in continuing to push their artistic boundaries. Smartly, THE CALLOUS DAOBOYS never try to repeat past success like the mathcore-meets-jazz-pop freakout of Star Baby or brilliantly unhinged Title Track. Instead, after guiding listeners into the Museum, Schizophrenia Legacy spends just shy of five minutes barreling from chaotic metalcore to off-kilter melodic passages and a lounge jazz section replete with chilled saxophone and some good old-fashioned earworm choruses. From there, it only gets bigger, weirder and more impossible to pigeonhole the band’s ever-broadening sound.
Where Full Moon Guidance takes Celebrity Therapist’s mathcore and twists it up with poppy choruses, Tears On Lambo Leather is a brutalising affair that flirts with beatdown hardcore particularly during a feature from heavyweights ORTHODOX, before it segues into Lemon, which shares more DNA with JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE’s Like I Love You in its hip-swaying pop groove. None of this should work but there’s such a singular vision running through the aural disparity, it remains tied together. Even better, this is barely the halfway mark of an album that continues to surprise and delight.
Idiot Temptation Force might only drop its chorus once, but it echoes THE HOME TEAM briefly with R&B flair amongst the chaos, while latest single Distracted By The Mona Lisa goes into full-on mid career FALL OUT BOY territory, seemingly replete with Pace adopting a vocal cadence that’s similar to Patrick Stump. The finale of the album is easily one of their finest ever moments; at almost twelve minutes, it’s a beefy ask, but give Country Song In Reverse your attention because it injects some near-post metal along with the gorgeous saxophone parts and Pace’s own caustic howls.
I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven is a masterful study in the contradictions that lie at the heart of THE CALLOUS DAOBOYS; this is easily their most esoteric, challenging work yet. It’s an hour long, after all, and it doesn’t so much as detour into other genres as it does tear through them like a hurricane, taking bits and pieces back with them. It’s also deliberately obtuse at times, Pace screaming nonsense during Idiot Temptation Force, or the opening to Douchebag Safari that echoes the classic menu themes from Wii Sports.
Despite this, it’s easily their most accessible, pop-forward album as full songs like Lemon or Distracted By The Mona Lisa prove, but they also meld far more hooks into every single song amongst head-spinning riffs like those on Schizophrenia Legacy. While it might be a monument to the anxieties and contradictions inherent to being in a critically-acclaimed band in a very niche scene there’s nothing remotely close to failure on I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven – but hopefully in 300 years’ time, it’ll certainly be honoured in museums as the baffling, wonderfully idiosyncratic masterstroke that it is.
Rating: 10/10
I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven is set for release on May 16th via MNRK Heavy.
Like THE CALLOUS DAOBOYS on Facebook.