Adonis Decay
Messenger
4.6
Synopsis:
Damnit Danceface Records. I hate it when a label contacts me personally to follow up with a review and says something like “Hey Erik!-I’m glad you are reviewing band xyz-I look forward to reading your review”, and then my review goes something like this:
Review:
The debut 5 track EP from Virginia based metalcore act Adonis Decay is pretty mediocre, and if not for some decent musicianship, borderline bad. Hindered by a hollow production and the injection of every modern metalcore/tech metal cliché around, including but not limited to clean vocals, harmonic arpeggios, chaotic stuttering, a dash of death metal, dual screams/growls, introspective moments, forced complexity and proggy noodling. The thing is, Between the Buried and Me and a handful of other bands (Veil of Maya, Last Chance to Reason, The Demonstration, The Human Abstract, What’s He Building in There?, etc) already did it, and did it way better (well, some of them).
What really hurts Adonis Decay is that the songs come across as randomly strung together segments. For example, second track, “The Red Beyond” and fourth track “Fractured Existence” are about two of the most incoherent and muddled, directionless tracks I’ve ever heard. There's being adventurous and ambitious, then there’s being utterly unstructured. And it’s not the Between the Buried and Me kind of off the wall unstructured, it’s a tangible lack of cohesion and the collage of ideas by some talented individuals simply thrown together and called songs. It’s like the band members simply went off into their own separate corners of the studio, and came together with their recorded output and just threw it all together.
However, there is some potential here as shown in a few brief moments of lucidity of “Harbinger of Pestilence”, but even then, they are mired in such a hodge-podge of unfortunately now trendy elements and they get washed away. Also to their credit, the band strays from the ‘look how cool and quirky we are’ song titles and keep things in almost tech death metal realm.
Still, Adonis Decay are a young band and Danceface are a young label who still have Time of Cholera on their tiny roster, so there is hope.
