AESTHESIS DEAD LETTER CIRCUS

[ UNFD]

There’s a lot of garbage fauxmetal out there. Take a cursory glance at rage on a Saturday night and you’ll invariably enter a half-hour vortex of shirt-grabbing mock-rock we thought we got rid of when The Butterfly Effect’s Clint Boge was politely shown the door. DLC escape that category because of their songwriting chops. In Plain Sight is a bit Jeep ad, The Burning Number goes toe-to-toe with Deftones circa ‘97 then Show Me Up shoves everything out of the way so Kim Benzie’s mid-range vox can glide through, eventually letting Luke Williams’ luxurious drum fills in. X needs more of an X factor. A better title than Aesthesis would borrow from Daniel Clowes’ unsettling novel: Like a Velvet Glove Cast In Iron. / MC