Mydriasis is an excessive dilation of the pupil due to disease or drugs. Well give me the drugs or the disease rather than listening to another hardcore album. This Berkshire five-piece’s PR blurb manages to feature “visionary melodic hardcore”, “post hardcore with a brain” and “experimental rock with post hardcore sounds” to try and cover every base of what I prefer to label as “banal and unlistenable shite-hardcore”.
The same whiney vocals that mean Radiohead get’s right on my tits at times feature heavily. The clipped & shouty background vocals of cliche-hardcore run throughout the album, unwarranted numerous tempo changes in each song and dragging the tunes out for as long as humanly possibly are also staples. Unfortunately there's a huge number of potential listeners for this and they'll hate me. I won't count that as a loss.
The lack of grabbing my attention means I'm not certain if the spoken word overlays on
Shinrah were meant to be humourous or poilitical satire, fifteen minutes in and track three has lost my interest for the rest of the album. I may have wandered off and only paid half attention from there on.
The Mannequins provided an inoffensive soundtrack for loading the washing machine until the vocals got excruciatingly screamy.
Mirrors and Magnets suited washing the dishes quite well with it's pots & pans beats. The rest of the album carried me nicely through taking the bin out and doing the hoovering.
There are moments of good sprinkled throughout ‘In Order Of Appearance’ but they are sparse, the almost industrial sections of
The Mannequins, the violin intro to
Orb, but each time things start to drag on—although perseverance reveals a nice piano outro to
Forced To Relate, masquerading under it's own title of
Inner City Fields— long after any interest has gone and the hardcore roots start to show as the mood is ripped apart time and again—maybe that's the purpose of hardcore music and I just don't get. I've already heard so, so many, completely similar sounding bands to mydriasis the boredom is turning to rage, I pray for the day the genre finally collapses under it's own weight of repetative self-referencing cliche crapness.
On the plus side the cover art features an etch-a-sketch.
In Order Of Appearance is released 23rd October on Lockjaw Records
http://www.mydriasis.co.uk/ http://www.myspace.com/mydriasismusic 
