Emmure - Look At Yourself album review

It’s impossible to take Emmure seriously when their frontman is a self-proclaimed “egotistical, psychotic, moronic douche”, and they’ve caused yet another fiasco with a t-shirt that appears to depict a battered female. But you have to admire Frankie Palmeri’s tenacity; with what is basically an entirely new band (they all quit in 2015), Look At Yourself is arguably Emmure’s strongest work since 2011’s Speaker Of The Dead. Guitarist Josh Davis brings a fresh remedy to the band’s tiring beatdowns with idiosyncratic techniques and even some rock riffs while Smokey and Turtle In A Hare Machine are Meshuggah-level heavy. Ice Man Confessions storms in like a bruising attack on early Korn-meets-Slipknot and Russian Hotel Aftermath stomps around like a serial killer in an abattoir. If Look At Yourself is meant to be about soulful reflection it sure as hell doesn’t sound like it; if anything the frontman sounds as bitter and twisted as ever. But weirdly that’s one of Emmure’s redeeming features. Where so many other bands pretend to be pissed off with the world, Frankie Palmeri really is.