Frequent readers of MetalSucks.net will know of frequent contributor Sergeant D, who in addition to writing for the website also maintains his own site known as Stuff You Will Hate. A couple years back on Stuff You Will Hate, Sergeant D brought to the attention of the internet metal crowd an Australian outfit by the name of Endworld. Their song "Never Trust", and the corresponding (terrible) music video, became showcase pieces for how not to write a song, how not to make a music video, and basically how not to be a brodowncore scenester douchebag. The title of the post containing Endworld's ode to creative bankruptcy was "When your deathcore band is the shitty version of Defiler", referencing yet another brodowncore scenester douchebag brigade comprised of levels of suck previously thought unheard of in "heavy" music. I'm fairly certain Annotations of an Autopsy, Great Britain's worst export since Heil Honey, I'm Home, saw the video and, in a haze brought on by a combination of too much weed and too few brain cells, said to themselves, "Hey, ya know that moderately enjoyable death metal album we made with Erik Rutan a couple years back? Fuck that shit, brah, that didn't have enough slams in it! Let's completely throw that sound out and make something so stereotypically 'bro' that not even other scenesters will like it!" And that's exactly what they fucking did.
I know many will cry afoul at an absolute negative score of zero percent, just like many cry similarly afoul at a score of one hundred percent, but in the case of Dark Days there is no other score that fits the sheer lack of anything creative, original, interesting, listenable, or smart in this EP's 18 or so minutes of aural sodomy. There are only four songs, but every single one of them run together 99.99998% of the time. Every slam, every chuggachugga breakdown, every lame attempt at sounding "brutal" sounds exactly like the one that just came before it. This is an album built upon the false idea that more slamming = more brutal. Sorry to break it to you Emmure wannabes, but playing mid-tempo range chugging with a production quality tailor made to make you sound as heavy as possible is not brutal. God of Emptiness is both brutal and haunting. Cannibal Corpse is brutal. Dark Days is not brutal. Dark Days does not deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as "brutal". Each song, while being incredibly stupid as a whole, has its own standout moment where you just pause your audio player and facepalm as hard as you possibly can. The pinnacle moment of stupidity in this regard comes on the very first track, "Buried in a Bad Rep"; at about :57 we hear a choir of gang vocal bros shout in the lamest, most uninterested manner possible, "SO SUCK MY FUCKING DICK!". It's moments like this that really make me wonder why it had to be Chuck Schuldiner and Quorthon that died young. We really need them nowadays. The second song, Reznov, is memorable only in that its first 45 seconds represent that .000001% of something different through being the only segment of the album not to be a mid-tempo chugging groove. These 45 seconds, while still incredibly uninspired and uninteresting, are the only link this EP has to AOAA's former speedy roots, after which it descends into more endless chuggalugg grooving. The album's title track is literally so nondescript that I cannot remember a single thing about it beyond it being the title track, and the final track, "Stage Breaker", is only memorable due to most of that song's vocals being the wimpy gang shouts that have dominated this entire record; it's overkill on the final track though, as not one section goes by without some kind of gang shout. The only member of the band that's stayed around past the Erik Rutan album is the singer, whose name I forget and will from here on refer to as Fatty McStupidHat. His voice has degenerated past the point of no return, going from bland yet usable on the previous album to just being a Johnny Plague ripoff. All the instrumentalists here are new, the last album's death metal lineup all gone, and there's nothing that can be said about their performances here.
Then there are the lyrics. It's brocore, so of course the lyrics are gonna be big, dumb, and stupid, but they are taken to a new level of "no human being with an ounce of brain matter in their skulls would say this stuff without a hint of irony". There's the aforementioned hilariously piss poor "SO SUCK MY FUCKING DICK!" gang shout from the first song, but each song contains such mind numbingly retarded lyrics that you have got to wonder if whoever wrote them has some sort of severe mental defect. As you could probably tell, the EP drops the gore themes that the band's early material contained, as well as the mad apocalyptic ravings of The Reign of Darkness. In their place is brocore posturing so asinine and juvenile that not even Winds of Plague's latest disasterpiece could top it. The word "fuck" is the word of the day for AOAA, being used 27 times throughout the EP's 18:27 run time, showing perfectly that AOAA have both run out of song ideas and run out of the necessary supply of oxygen needed for proper brain functions. The worst offending passage on the record is in Stage Breaker. Read at your own risk.
My dying words to the world would be
Fuck you
all you pricks tryna run your mouth
Fuck you
My dying words to the world would be
Fuck you
and if you think i respect you
Fuck you too
Clearly somebody was dropped off a fourth floor balcony when they were a tot. The only other way one could write something so magnificently brainless is if they happened to be a member of HellYeah or Five Finger Death Punch.
In the end, we can only stop to reflect on the pure fermented anal leakage that is Dark Days. The fact that the EP's title is bringing to my head the chorus of Satyricon's "Black Crow of a Tombstone" is a crime against humanity. Not because of the Satyricon song, as that song is both genuine and an actually good song, but because it's forcing me to equate one of Norway's black metal kings with the UK's musical equivalent to rectal cancer. Thank whatever invisible sky creature you pray to that Annotations of an Autopsy have decided to call it quits, as I'm not sure this realm of existence could take another Dark Days, or for that matter, another Emmure clone. Let this be a warning to all prospective musical artists, instrumentalists, singers, vocalists, or otherwise inclined to an audio medium: do not make the mistakes Annotations of an Autopsy made with Dark Days. You might just end up as a post on a website under the title, "When your deathcore band is the shitty version of Endworld".
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