by Chelsea Ives

“We all float down here.” – a line which never fails to make my skin crawl. So imagine my surprise when I heard it while listening to Marianas Trench’ new song “The Killing Kind”. The Canadian pop-rock band released their newest album, Phantoms on March first. This is the band’s fifth studio album, and “The Killing Kind” is the final song on the album.

I was intrigued when the song first started – it finally sounds different than all their other music! The song starts with harpsichord, and slowly introduces a triangle – it almost sounds like a more up-beat but less-scary Jaws theme song. Josh Ramsay’s voice starts it off quiet and low, until the song picks up with the classic reference to IT.

But unfortunately the song is also a classic – classic because it sounds like every other song Mariana’s Trench has released. The song borrows the band’s theme from their past two albums, referencing lines from other songs or albums in each song. “The Killing Kind,” as the outro concludes with the line, “just hush, Eleonora,” to blend back into the intro track, “Eleonora”. While this album-as-one-extended-song move was exciting in their 2011 album, Ever After, it misses the mark in Phantoms because there’s no clear thematic train to link the songs together.

“The Killing Kind,” builds into the same “Astoria” sounding-scream by Ramsay, and then an alien-siren comes in, before becoming sweeping orchestral music, then the band harmonizes, and then one final smashing-together of all the sounds with Josh Ramsay’s voice before what you think is the end. But then, the song comes around full force again. They just don’t know when to quit.

Altogether, the song was an excellent choice for the close of the album, as it does seem like the band was trying to go in a different direction than in their other albums. The horror-esque theme with references to Poe’s poetry makes “The Killing Kind” intriguing, but ultimately, I think it ends as a six minute roller coaster of instrumental mash-ups which just leaves the listener nauseous.