Seattle/New Hampshire-based Trap Them has been ballyhooed as
a potent newcomer in the “extreme” metal scene, a classification that
makes more sense once you’ve been exposed to the quartet’s brutal new
epiphany of an album, Seizures in Barren Praise.
Seizures writhes in a kind of convulsive pissiness, anchored
and split to shards on the waves of vocalist Ryan Mckenney’s fierce
howls and growls. It’s the sequel, in essence, to the group’s 2007
triad of releases beginning with their self-titled 7-inch, followed by
their full-length debut Sleepwell Deconstructor. Their third
release of ’07 was their Deathwish debut, Séance Prime, a
deadly potion of heavy ferocity, and a siren call that a new hardcore
sheriff was in town.
Their latest finds the band continuing the saga by way of a story of
a fictional ghost town, Barren Praise, in which those who’ve chosen to
stay in the town are reporting on the imminent doom laid out before
them. If you’re hoping for this to be an easy notion to pick up on,
you’re wrong. Mckenney’s rambling scrawls feel more like aimless
Facebook-blog fuckery than intellectual prose. Vocally, the album
ultimately disappears into the shadows, which (luckily) invites some of
the hairiest riffs since Converge’s When Forever Comes Crashing,
then weaves in and out of more stolid instrumental expanses before
ushering the crushing blow of filthy tone and
lightning-in-a-bottle doom on tracks like “Flesh and Below.”
The band’s pedigree alone is worth noting, with guitarist Brian Izzi
having been a member of December Wolves, and drummer Mike Justian
having manned the kit for Unearth and Shai Hulud. But underground
credentials or no, Trap Them’s prog-metal dirges and arbitrary
math-metal luster have only recently been given a new beacon in the
mainstream by bands like Fucked Up. Trap Them have exploded onto a
scene sorely in need of novelty, and with the quickness of their ascent
as hardcore saviors, in that ambiguously detached faction of music
dwellers, praise probably has little do with it, barren or not.