Weird experience for me.
On one, I found this album a bit anemic and rudimentary. Once a song starts, rarely does it do anything unpredictable, and as I said back in the post about The Beths, your mileage will vary. In this case, I don't naturally gravitate towards this era of emo (or post-hardcore emo pop or whatever. I'm not trying to be flippant, this is genuinely not an area of music I can speak on, genre wise, with confidence) and so it didn't really carry a lot of juice for me. But I can't help but think that even if it did, this album just felt a little meat and potatoes.
On the other hand, they clearly know their way around and hook and riff. There's these moments where they show a little bit of flex. But the problem is that rarely do these moments last long enough to feel meaningful or stay in mind for long enough to leave an impact. But they were there. And because they were there, I never quite turned on the experience. "Surely, I thought, "a moment will come when this album will take off." Sadly that moment never came. But there were flashes.
So I walked away from it not disliking it, but disappointed. I saw what could've been, and I was bummed that I didn't get it. But honestly, that was better than I thought it was going to go because a few people in my life have spent the last week or so doing their damnedest to poison the well on this one. According to them, this is their sellout album. I've heard that claim about a few of their albums, but mainly this one.
I don't know. Maybe they got to me. Maybe this feeling of flatness comes from them sanding off their edges for radio. I genuinely don't know. But I have become oddly convinced that there's an AFI album I'm going to love the absolute fuck out of. The talent and the vision is clearly there. But as far as Decemberunderground goes, it just felt like there was something missing.
Favorite Songs: "Summer Shudder," "Love Like Winter," "Affliction"
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