In a guest column he wrote for Metalsucks in 2010, Trap Them singer Ryan McKenney confessed, “My sense of humor sucks.” Even back then, this was not news. Trap Them released their Filth Rations EP that year, and it was as complete a statement as any full-length they’d recorded to date—and just as joyless. Darker Handcraft followed in 2011, and that album elevated McKenney and crew to a new level. Prior to that, they were little more than another bunch of post-Converge metalcore miscreants; after Filth Rations and Darker Handcraft, they sunk into a misanthropic pit of their own making. Misanthropy and humor, of course, can go hand-in-hand quite beautifully—but judging from Blissfucker, Trap Them’s new full-length and first since Darker Handcraft, McKenney is once again not laughing, and he doesn't have to.
There’s a grim, twisted irony at the heart of Trap Them that gives the band a perverse dimensionality, and Blissfucker brings it to the surface in a vivid blush of bruised black and blue. Where McKenney has long been a seething, writhing hardcore frontman cut from the same cloth as Converge’s Jacob Bannon, guitarist Brian Izzi is steeped in the vintage Swedish death metal of Entombed and At the Gates. Trap Them’s division of labor—and influence—has never been less distinct than on Blissfucker. The stylistic friction that defined the group has ground it down to the bone; hardcore and metal have finally bled together into an irreducible whole. “Salted Crypts” lays out an intricate template constructed of D-beat gallop, razor-swift thrash riffs, and pockets of charred melody; “Lungrunners” relies less on subtlety and more on time-lapse blast-beat erosion. Instead of detracting from McKenney’s nerve-tightening screams and abstract poetics, it underscores his openly dire worldview. The only constant in life is change, and that change comes quickly, perilously, and mercilessly.
McKenney and Izzi are now the only remaining original members of Trap Them. Bassist Baudhuin and drummer Brad Fickeisen make their full-length debut with the band here, with Fickeisen in particular having to fill a big vacancy—namely, former Coliseum drummer Chris Maggio, who brought his grenade-like intensity to Filth Rations and Darker Handcraft. As great as Maggio was, Fickeisen is an upgrade. More precise and dynamic, yet able to cultivate an air of chaos amid his calculation, Fickeisen pushes the rest of the band—especially Izzi—toward a more freeform and flowing cadence. Even as it suffocates, it breathes. On the sprawling tracks “Savage Climbers” and “Let Fall Each and Every Sedition Symptom”—whose only fault is sounding too much alike, dual climaxes on an album that might have been better served by one final death throe—nothing is released. Chasms of feedback and wounded howls open up, only to swallow themselves. And for every bomb the band lobs, McKenney hurls his own body on top of it.
The conceit that life and death are at stake every time a guitar is tuned or a microphone checked is, in a sense, romantic. McKenney, it should be remembered, doesn’t say that he has no sense of humor at all—only that his sense of humor sucks. There are no moments of lightness on Blissfucker, not even the steely glint of gallows humor. But there is a weirdness to its nested levels of nihilism and noise, as well as a subversive sense of both hardcore’s intransigence and metal’s melodrama. Too many shards of ideas are shoved into the long songs, and Fickeisen’s flash sometimes borders on showmanship, a glaring incongruity for a spartan outfit like Trap Them. Mostly, though, the new lineup locks into a trance of fatalistic terror, one that culminates in a hopeless, unhinged ecstasy. There may not be much to laugh about, but there’s definitely a punch line.
