Album review: The Callous Daoboys – I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven

The Callous Daoboys have less of a trajectory than a blast radius, having put a dent in the scene with unpredictable records and incendiary live performances. The job of a new album, then, is less about direction of travel than maintaining that flailing intensity. The good news is that with I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven, the Atlanta sextet have produced an opus that’s equal to the task, housed within a concept that contextualises its scintillating strangeness, while making a statement about what the point of all this is.

Of the band’s third album, and its place in The Museum Of Failure, a futuristic repository, vocalist Carson Pace has suggested that it’s “an artefact that’s been preserved, and hundreds of years in the future, you’re listening to this album in the museum. It’s a known failure, but the narrative is, ‘If it survives forever, is it truly a failure?’”

Much like the music on offer, it’s a head-swivelling idea; not only does it suggest, to a degree, that The Callous Daoboys’ wildly eclectic output is ahead of its time, which is given credence by the journey Schizophrenia Legacy alone takes you on, but it’s a reminder that ‘good’ art is as much about endurance as quality.

For some, of course, this will be a pretentious distraction from the music – and that’s fine. Even without these layers of meaning, I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven compels from beginning to end, never allowing the listener a moment to get comfortable, or its creators a chance to be complacent. Even in more conventional moments, like the predominantly melodic Two-Headed Trout, you know something bewildering is coming, but you’re not sure how, or in what form – and when it does arrive, it’s like being wrapped around the head with fiery nunchucks of sound.

Sometimes the switch up is the other way around: the magnificently-titled Tears On Lambo Leather drops you straight into a mechanised hellscape, peppered with prospective pockets of ambience. Lemon and Body Horror For Birds, meanwhile, offer a similar function on the record as a whole, a one-two of the calm and collected, though they’re no less dense with ideas and styles.

Despite this abundance of creativity, I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven doesn’t have its eyes facing outwards at the world around us, unlike its predecessor, 2022’s Celebrity Therapist. Instead it’s a personal record, chronicling Carson’s experiences since getting sober in 2021. If that’s truly the case, then listening to Idiot Temptation Force and Douchebag Safari make you worry about the journey the vocalist has been on.

Never mind waiting for the future, it may never arrive – hang this in the Louvre now. It’ll fascinate some, terrify others, and some it may even piss off. But isn’t that what art is supposed to do?

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Every Time I Die, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Mike Patton

Listen to The Callous Daoboys on Kerrang! In Conversation.

I Don't Want To See You In Heaven is released on May 16 via MNRK Heavy.