By Genre: Metalcore, Pop Metal, Pop Rock
Favorite Track: “Crimson & Clover”
For a couple weeks there, everyone was up in arms about that AI band the Velvet Sundown—remember that?—and it sparked many, many conversations about AI and the future of music. What’s the value of human expression, of emotion laid bare, when songs created by computers can rack up millions of plays? (At the time of this writing, the Velvet Sundown has just a hair under 3 million monthly listeners on Spotify.) It’s an understandable concern, particularly if you genuinely value art and music. However, I would submit that such fears may be overblown when, functionally, the music of the Velvet Sundown is no different than VIOLENT NATURE, the fifth album from Detroit five-piece I Prevail.
I Prevail’s trajectory has been an interesting one. Although they arrived a few years too late to fully capitalize on the Risecore trend—that is, metalcore bands smuggling outright pop hooks into their otherwise Warped Tour-ready songs—their first albums leaned into that formula all the same. As that style’s fallen out of favor, the band has updated their sound accordingly. The new trend in heavy music is to invert the Risecore template, something bands like Bad Omens and Sleep Token have done to massive success. For all intents and purposes, these are essentially pop rock bands, only they’re pop rock bands who occasionally include breakdowns and screams in their music.
It all comes off in the end as much too self-conscious, like I Prevail is too embarrassed to commit to the sound they’ve been barreling toward for years now.
“Synthetic Soul,” for its first two-thirds, is a genuinely startling opening track. What begins as a piano dirge unravels slowly, blossoming into an eerie industrial rocker that suggests aggression without relying on perfunctory breakdowns; it’s a bold choice to open VIOLENT NATURE, and it’s one of the best songs in the band’s entire oeuvre. But, three minutes in, I Prevail kick into a paint-by-numbers breakdown. When the screams come in, it’s clearly supposed to feel cathartic, the release of all the tension built up over the previous few minutes; instead, it kills the momentum in its tracks. It’s predictable, bland, and tired, completely undercutting the work they’d done up to that point in subverting that very expectation.
“NWO” introduces one of VIOLENT NATURE’s most glaring pitfalls: the recurrent bizarre vocal modulation. The song’s chorus is marred by pitch-shifted low growls that sound glaringly out of place, jutting against the feral shrieks that open the track, in particular; the first verse has energy, a sputtering beat giving way to a fiery solo, but the clean vocals are again warped beyond recognition. There are ways to employ such tactics tastefully, of course, but the problem is that throughout VIOLENT NATURE these tricks feel cheap; there’s not much threatening about the way Eric Vanlerberghe delivers the ultimatum in the song’s bridge—“Find your place in the dirt / Or be crushed by the weight of the Earth”—when he sounds like a demon in a made-for-TV movie. “Rain” and “God” employ similar effects, watering down Vanlerberghe’s scream into a caricature.
It doesn’t help on “Rain” that that moment is the only time Vanlerberghe lets loose on the track. Half the album departs entirely from metal, and of those songs only three even feature any semblance of the band I Prevail used to be. Singles “Pray,” “Annihilate Me,” and “Rain” are the same sort of dark-toned electronic-tinged pop rock that Imagine Dragons and Coldplay traffic in these days, both featuring shoehorned breakdowns tucked away in their final minutes to retain their Fearless Records bona fides.
“Crimson & Clover” is an outlier on VIOLENT NATURE; as a result, it’s the easy highlight. There’s no crescendo, no surprise drop, no trace of their metalcore origins. It’s a soft and tender pop ballad that, unlike the singles earlier on the album, evinces no shame in that fact. Vanlerberghe is a gifted singer, and he delivers the song’s feathery hook with an ease that he never approaches anywhere else on the LP. “Crimson & Clover” has a blurry feel, too, that helps it stand out, owing to the layers of falsetto croons that undergird the track. There’s far more heart that comes through for these four minutes than the entire other 28.
By contrast, “Into Hell” is another straightforward pop rock track that feels rote. Where “Crimson & Clover” is warm and hazy, “Into Hell” goes for the same arena sound as “Rain.” It is ultimately a more successful stab at pop rock than that song, primarily because the band doesn’t attempt to lean away from the genre tag. “Into Hell” does, however, immediately follow “Rain” in the tracklist, making for a bizarre listen. Admittedly, much of VIOLENT NATURE is structured oddly; all the softer songs are nestled together in the middle, with the bookends being the album’s heaviest offerings, with the exception of “Violent Nature” breaking up that run in between “Annihilate Me” and “Rain.”
The title track is likely the album’s nadir, too. It’s the heaviest song here, and the most technically dizzying, but it feels too one-note for its two-minute runtime to hit the way it should—particularly egregious given its placement on the record. Like on “NWO” and “Rain,” the biggest moment of “Violent Nature” comes in its bridge as the guitars fade away and whirring synths take their place, Vanlerberghe reentering the fray with a distorted spoken word monologue that’s genuinely difficult to take seriously. That’s the posture of most of that song in particular, a strange patchwork of over-the-top camp and stony-eyed self-seriousness that fails at both. Take the chorus of “Violent Nature,” the boast that, “I’m a sick motherfucker with a violent nature.” It feels less like a taunt or even an admission of guilt than an attempt at depth—it’s the equivalent of dressing a character in all black as a substitute for meaningful characterization. It’s baldly untrue, but they’ve got to convince themselves the rest of us are buying the act.
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