A frustrating mix of great heights and great hindrance.
MCID, the third full-length release from Massachusetts rock outfit Highly Suspect, mounts the task of blending rock, pop, hip-hop and metal whilst forging a cohesive and compelling narrative; MCID is certainly their most ambitious outing, but also their weakest.
Born from the loveable and criminally undecorated mind of Johnny Stevens, MCID (standing for the band’s mantra My Crew Is Dope) plummets from the heights of its anticipation with an unbalanced and misshapen batch of 15 tracks that range from a peak amongst pinnacles to those that wallow in a state of compositional confusion. It must be highlighted in the most ostentatious manner possible that MCID is by no means a bad album, only that at times it is hair-wrenchingly frustrating and after multiple listens, I shall be needing a toupee.
As a package, it’s a mess. A bloated, unfocused mess that struggles to link its’ narrative beats along with its’ own musical ones. It frantically mashes the tropes of hip-hop, rock and blues in such clumsy disarray that it forgets to actually make heads or tails of this Frankenstein’s record after the group has regained sensibility.
But, once you’ve finally taught your brain to forget what logic is you can sort of figure what the hell MCID is as opposed to what it’s supposed to be; these are two very different things. What Highly Suspect have done is produced an identity crisis. The first third jumps from stride to stride kicking off with 16 (their first teaser track from the LP) that, despite featuring no guitars, presents all the urgency and cinema of a great pop-rock ballad. This initial stint also tends to the nerves of Highly Suspect purists with Upperdrugs and Canals that play to their strengths of memorable riffage, powerhouse vocals (Stevens rarely fails to deliver) and a couple of earworm choruses to add to the collection.
After the exultance of Canals drifts out of earshot, MCID decides to torture the listener with the first of its’ two redundant interludes: Tetsuo’s Bike. Sounding like an alternate dimension’s take on the Rugrats theme it soon devolves into an offence of tinny cowbells, snares and disc scratching that comes off like a pre-schooler playing with the DJ function on a keyboard. Its inclusion is simply staggering, doing nothing to supplement the tone of the album and serves only to bloat out its’ already rather inflated run-time.
My brow furrows deeper when tackling the hip-hop elements in this musical dirty pint. It seeps its way into many production choices with multiple songs barely crawling past the 3:30 mark and in other cases – like SOS and Taking off – the real instruments are either lost behind a wall of electronic nonsense or replaced with artificial duplicity. The aforementioned swollen-nature of the album derives from the hip-hop-rock fusion as Highly Suspect attempts to match the status quo of rap records that hits listeners with a heap of snappy tracks; are a few throwaways and futile interludes really worth the albums’ longevity?
Fortunately, there are sparks from the past like the wonderous Arizona which blends intimate acoustic guitar with orchestral strings in one of MCID’s and Highly Suspects’ most impressively real performances.
Sticking with the rap theme, MCID is the first to include features which fittingly wind up being an uneven batch. While Stevens’ take on rapping comes off as jilted and cringe-inducing, Tee Grizzly happily makes something of The Silk Road with a decent performance that, pushing Stevens’ aside, turns into a decent Eminem-Rihanna dynamic. @tddybear is one of the album’s highlights sporting gorgeous neo-psych licks and chilling lyricism supported by Nothing But Thieves vocalist Connor Mason who turns out to be Steven’s perfect vocal partner with impressive falsettos that overlays a beautiful-cataclysm of drums and bass in a rampaging outro.
However, MCID makes a mockery of rap as Tokyo Ghoul sees both Stevens and Young Thug delivering an ungodly performance while SOS makes little use of Gojira vocalist Joe Duplantier whose flurry of death-metal growls are bolted onto the intro/outro of what is otherwise an insufficiently tame pop-rock number; way to waste a legend, lads.
If you were to single out specific tracks, trim the fat off the edges, you could have a very strong third record. The band just seemed too keen to showcase this rock-hip-hop meld to notice what it was doing to the overall picture which is conclusively a very unfocused puzzle. The thematic contexts of self-loathing, suicide, depression, political strife, are evident to a point but are ultimately compromised in splashes of mediocre songwriting in an effort to keep the run-time up.
Despite my evident frustrations with MCID, I’m not left without hope for the future. Nearly half of the track-list demonstrates classic H.S flair across their mature composition and astounding vocal performances; I’m happy to see this album as a mere slip-up fuelled by admirable ambitions. With age comes wisdom and I’m certain MCID is just another learning curve and it won’t be long till they take heed to the very obvious lesson; don’t try to be something you’re not.
Rating 5/10
Words: Alex Mace
Photo Source: I.M.P. Concerts