SEE YOU NEXT TUESDAY

When SEE YOU NEXT TUESDAY rolled out of Bay City, MI with "Parasite", there was a certain freshness to its psychotic death/grind/hardcore mix. Though not necessarily innovative, the album's all-directions-at-once arrangements had a certain identity, even for those that do not typically listen to this style of extreme music, myself included. As for "Intervals", not so much. Much has been made by the band about ditching the ridiculously long, though somewhat comical, song titles and the progression that has been purported to take place on this new batch of tunes, as well as the darker vibes. It is in fact a darker album, but progression is a relative term.

The arrangements are just about as schizophrenic as "Parasite", though sonically booming segments and down-tuned parts remind periodically of bands like THE ACACIA STRAIN, albeit in small doses. The mid-range screamo vocals are alternated with growled barks and cast conventional ideas of patterning to the wind, as one would expect. The stop-on-a-dime-and-turn-left moments and neck breaking blows on a song like "Eternity?" work quite well, as do the cuts on which the band locks into a chug-groove between spastic outbursts, as is the case on "Goodnight (Our Last Dance)". The approach continues to be over the top and nerve damaging, whether in brief nut-job attacks or in longer instances when the arrangements are allowed some breathing room to rumble through the rubble.

The problem is that somewhere along the way SEE YOU NEXT TUESDAY lost some of its edge, or maybe "Parasite" was not as strong as my original assessment would have indicated. It's hard to tell. More likely, in this ocean of metalcore, the band slipped into some level of mediocrity. There is no lack of blinding brutality and SEE YOU NEXT TUESDAY still delivers the occasional psychotic freak-out with verve, yet something got lost in the shuffle. Not good, not bad, just average.