It’s reasonable to ask, given our track record, why we would even bother to review an album like ‘Axis Mundi’, which clearly isn’t up our street— in all honesty, we’d happily walk away from modern metalcore as a whole if it weren’t being forced down our throats. It’s bands like Imminence who’re grabbing high-profile festival slots and dominating the discourse these days, which leaves us with a difficult question to answer: what the hell is the point of this?

Imminence have often been described as a particularly artful player in their genre, but that has more to do with frontman Eddie Berg’s affinity for the violin than it does with their actually songwriting. The eleven tracks that make up ‘Axis Mundi’ are some of the most cut-and-dry metalcore you can possibly find, recycling formulas that don’t feel quite so ‘modern’ after you’ve heard them ten billon times over. Right from the off, opener ‘Twisting In The Wind’ goes point-by-point ticking off every cliché under the sun, from its self-indulgent ambient intro to its use of programmed drums to its eye-roll-inducing excuse for a breakdown— these are the ingredients Imminence are set on serving up again and again across the album, which would border on parody in any genre with a touch more self-awareness than this one.

So, Berg and company aren’t the most original group in the world, which isn’t such a crime in-and-of-itself: the problem with ‘Axis Mundi’ isn’t just that it feels like leftovers, but that it’s reheating a meal you spat out the first time around. You’d better enjoy the symphonic swells underpinning ‘False Light,’ because the song’s main riff is quite literally one note— Imminence are pulling from djent, supposedly, but c’mon, they aren’t exactly Meshuggah. As far as metal is concerned, the band have boiled the sound down not to its fundamentals, but to absolutely nothing at all, leaving us with the laughable guitar work of ‘Leviathan’ and ‘Power Divine.’ Any and all attempts made to doll up these tracks in post only become feeble attempts to hide the vapid writing on offer here, which might explain why the record sounds the way that it does.

There are a million bands out there aiming to be the biggest, strongest, most-epicest crew out there, and Imminence are yet another group amping up the compression to inane levels. On any other record, the softness of a violin would provide an interesting contrast to the harshness of metalcore’s usual instrumentation: on ‘Axis Mundi,’ the strings instead stand out as the only texture with any human touch left intact. Lead single ‘The Sword That Never Bends’— a waste of an admittedly cool song title— is a prime example of how the loudness wars continue to suck the life from every project caught in the crossfire, filling itself with drums without definition, guitars without body and vocals without heart. Even if the sentimental ‘Crestfallen’ and ‘Devil May Cry’ were cream-of-the-crop metal ragers (which they aren’t, to be clear), this brickwalled production would still be cause for a grimace.

Imminence do seem to be clued in (at least to some degree) to the knowledge that their songs are glossier than a can of Dulux, finding room for a few moments of reprieve from the ungodly blasts of volume you’ll hear all over dreadful closer ‘Exodus’— these choice few tracks tend to be a little more palatable, thank goodness, but barely. Like pretty much all of their contemporaries, Berg and company draw unavoidable inspiration from Deftones on ‘Shed Your Skin,’ bringing moaned vocals and a mixture of violins, cellos and pianos into the spotlight: it’s disappointing to see the group once again pulling from the most obvious of influences here, but we’d have to admit that ‘If Not Now, When’ is the pick of the bunch as far as ‘Axis Mundi’ is concerned… but even then, the less said about the garish synth pop on ‘Didn’t Think About You (Lately),’ the better.

Imminence are a band pull of contradictions, the same internal conflicts that plague modern metalcore as a whole. They want to sound crushingly heavy without actually coming up with any grit; they want to be pretty and catchy in a genre actively working against them; they want to seem mysterious and poetic while having nothing to say. So long as groups in this genre keep poking their heads up, we’ll keep smacking them down. Imminence are no different from the others— the violin alone is not enough.