So many bands have an obsession with creating a goth-theatrical (gotheatrical?) mood in their music; all make-up/horror themes or dark flamboyance. Some have used it very effectively in the past, creating an identity for themselves and their fans in turn, but it’s so widespread these days that it has become utterly diluted.

For Bentley Park it does no favours, and they fail to fashion it to their own image, instead just relying on it to carry them through without any substance to back it up. In fact, pretty much everything about this band is stuck together and borrowed from elsewhere. Originality isn’t everything, but Bentley Park chose all the worst examples of alternative music to create a monster that should never have been brought to life.

‘Blood Ties’ sounds like Panic At The Disco combined with awful death metal grunts that just smack of a painful attempt to appeal to metal kids. They don’t serve any purpose in the song whatsoever and are delivered in such a ham-fisted way that it makes you blush for the band.

‘No Hope For The Hopeless’ is pretty much standard fair new-wave emo-pop. It’s fairly inoffensive, if you can manage to ignore the sheer outright offensiveness of the lyric “I try to get it back and make amends but I’d rather just sit and watch Scrubs and Friends”. Honestly, can you imagine singing that out loud at a concert?  It’s so banal it’s excruciating and certainly justifies the song title.

‘Dear Luscious 1’ makes matters worse with the line “It’s such a pity but this girl is a fitty” (barf), before the EP hits new heights of awfulness with ‘Sly_ther’. More death grunts, a line borrowed from Britney Spears and a general splicing of all of modern rock music’s most unwanted clichés.

Bentley Park, who hail from York, describe themselves without blinking as post-hardcore, an attempted association which is more than a little discourteous to the genre, regardless of what that label may have come to mean these days when ascribed to undeserving bands  like Pierce The Veil and Sleeping With Sirens.

Nothing they have created on this release seems genuine, everything feels like part of a scheme with which to increase the buy-in of the target audience. ‘All The Fists in the World Won’t Save You Now’ morphs from pop-punk to bratty metal half way through, but is desperate and forced, and when they attempt to sound all foreboding and scary in the closing track with the line “pray for repentance, pray for us all”, it makes you sigh and feel glad the experience is nearly over.

I wish I could come up with a redeeming factor so this review didn’t come across like a complete trashing of Bentley Park…but I couldn’t, and so unfortunately that’s pretty much what this is. It’s by some way the worst record I’ve listened to so far this year. Steer well clear.

1/5

‘Innocence’ by Bentley Park is out now.

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Words by Alex Phelan (@listen_to_alex)