I Prevail - True Power

I gave I Prevail's Trauma a pretty negative review. I liked a lot of stuff from it, but the album wasn't good by my standards. It came across weak and powerless, as Maynard might say. Totally willing to give them another shot though, so let's check out the new album True Power. I don't need the slip mat they included, but at least it didn't noticeably inflate the price tag. 

I do still expect a similar mish-mash of metal, umlauts, rap, and "is this still the same band?" -ness, but maybe they can make that spastic array of influences work to their advantage and appeal to a tangible demographic instead of the imaginary self unaware thing they had going (i'm the problem, accomodate me!). For comparison, Badflower's This Is How The World Ends was kind of a similar thing, but you can clearly tell Badflower is making fun of themselves. Trauma felt like "the Metacore version of 21 Pilots," so if they can avoid that this time around that would be great. 

Also, before we start, this is a gigantic waste of a gatefold. 

Proper good creepy intro, but the bad kind of Maroon 5 auto-tune drenched chorus. The good news is that it still sounds like the same band by the time we get to the track 5 single Bad Things. The bad news is that at least up to this point it's kinda the stereotypical white male rage that plagued Nü-Metal the first second and 3rd time around, but blaming the Devil. You want Fake to be a self-commentary about the previous attitude, and likewise want the second half to give us a real turn around, but i got a bad feeling this is just the narcissist calling everyone else a narcissist. Everybody's sorry on Judgement Day... blech. You know how Underoath got better after they walked away from the Christian Music scene? Yeah, this feels exactly the opposite, like I Prevail is just leaning into becoming a Christian Metalcore band. 

7 tracks without a whisper before the drop, but FWYTYK just couldn't resist. Ok, side b, do your worst. 

Great news! I made friends with all my demons and we're gonna pop a bunch of xanax and have a lethargic pool party! 

More directionless anger, but he's sick and tired of the negative. Which negative? What are you raging at? Two tracks left, i got a feeling we're going to ride all the way to the scene of the crash. Yep, just accept the doom. 

K, so the only way to unironically enjoy this is to be an actual psychopath. This is the metality of the mass shooter, the white nationalist, the christo-fascist. This is not constructively venting actual frustration, this is just the generic projection of hate born of depression and self-destruction, as though you can prevail by not prevailing. 

Again, there's serious cognitive dissonance here, one side or the other has to be ironic. Either I Prevail is the joke, or "true power" is, you can't actually have it both ways without actual dead people being the result. 

The absurdity is captured quite well in Closure. "Oh, you're breaking up with me? Makes sense, i'm objectively terrible. I'll just politely get out of the car and wave as you drive off." What is that? That's not human psychology, that's a Bottlean observation of an appearance devoid of any sense of humor. Given the entire previous record, i can only assume the reality is that you murdered her on the spot and then walked home like nothing happened. 

Obviously i could be completely wrong, but it all feels like glorifying and justifying the internal rage. Any sort of contextual commentary would be helpful, but there is none. Even Highly Suspect, who i in general don't like all that much, tempers Natural Born Killer with allusional self-deprecation by directly referencing Depeche Mode's Personal Jesus, i.e. they understand what they're doing is harmful. I don't think I Prevail does. 

Once again, i like a lot of it, i don't like certain parts, but overall i cannot figure out why i'm supposed to care. It feels like target marketing that missed any mark at all and makes me wonder who would actually say "yes, please, more of this." 

The down side is that i bought it, and that's an automatic thumbs up regardless of what i actually think of it. Well, here's what i actually think. I Prevail should not make albums, they're a band who should stick to being middle of the road tolerable outside of any context whatsoever. I doubt they intended to highlight the worst parts of the Nü-Metal ethos, or make an album that sounds like the dramatic-irony soundtrack of a Proud Boys rally, but they did absolutely nothing to prevent it from turning out that way, so [toilet flush] i'd recommend you don't bother listening to it. This is not an accurate depiction of functional human beings, but it's also not a coherent cautionary commentary on the current state of reality. This is the delusional fantasy of a maladjusted individual completely lacking in self-awareness and empathy, true power being in fact the opposite of whatever this is. Maybe they meant it to be meta and intentionally grotesque, but it feels more like using people treating you terrible as an excuse to be proud of being terrible, so i just straightforwardly don't like it. 

You could like it though. It's totally listenable if you're not opposed to Metalcore, Pop Punk, and Hardcore Rap all happening at the same time, and there are some musically enjoyable moments between the clumsy samples and directionless dark ambience. Like their previous effort Trauma however, i find myself wondering why i'm not listening to its influences instead. For me this is not new territory and there is way too much contemporaneous borrowing, as opposed to referencing any type of shared experience we might have, that i just end up feeling like I Prevail is dictating what i'm supposed to get out of it. It feels like i'm being bullied, and i'll stomp back when i'm tired of indulging it. 

So, final backhanded compliment: with True Power, I Prevail proves they aren't the Metalcore 21 Pilots; they're actually the Metalcore Nickelback, a great band mistakenly wasting their time and energy on songs and sentiments that really aren't that good, or at least ones i can't honestly get behind.