Review Summary: Wednesday 13’s missed opportunities.
Wednesday 13’s,
The Dixie Dead is a tactical blunder, if one was to take a look at the calendar and take heed to the band name; Wednesday 13 could have refused to conform to a typical release date and instead released an album on the Wednesday the 13th of February, in the year 2013. Despite the predictability of such a release date, doing so would’ve highlighted an intelligence behind this detrimentally predictable and highly clichéd record.
The Dixie Dead, relies heavily on back to back rhyming, trivial contextual ideas not to mention an almost constant rehashing of Wednesday 13’s back catalogue. A combination of recycled, immature ideas and sub-par instrumentalism ultimately leaves the listener with a disjointed and highly repetitive record. In retrospect to the previous release,
Calling All Corpses, which had a few catchy tracks the overall recipe was largely too much of the same thing this time around, sure
The Dixie Dead has the basics covered in an up-beat moderately horror hard rock record, but unfortunately that’s where all the ‘right’ things stop. The result is overbearing, tiring showing just how a repetition of ideas can become all too much.
Polished and produced to the prime, Wednesday 13 has at least moved with the times.
The Dixie Dead is clear, almost to a point of being over-produced. Keep in mind that the overall production of the record doesn’t just show every little instrumental aspect of the record in a more noticeable fashion, but it also highlights each and every recycled lyric and immature rhyming pattern. In just over forty-five minutes of musical tardiness, only one ‘highlight’ manages to surface. The album’s title track displays the strongest song writing on the release and actively uses some quality hook lines but this single gem is not enough to put
The Dixie Dead over the line. In some sort of disaster in design, Wednesday 13 has continued the trend of an intro/outro layout to his albums. The feature is something that worked reasonably well on
Calling All Corpses, but fails to remain relevant on this release and are simply there. Both the ‘Death Arise (Intro)’ and ‘Death Arise (Overture)’ build little to no atmosphere and do nothing to benefit the adjacent tracks, resulting in both a waste of time and drawing out a painful listen.
Overall,
The Dixie Dead is an album without cause but manages to be focused in its repetition. It’s clear that in 2013, the days of the
Bloodwork EP are gone and this is certainly no
Fang Bang or
Skeletons. The music that was once enjoyable has lost all appeal, especially considering that the music has been recycled way too many times. There’s always hope that another collaborative album (not unlike the record under the Murderdolls moniker) will promote better song-writing and fresher ideas but as it sits Wednesday 13’s fifth record fails on almost all accounts, raising the question of whether it’s time for Wednesday 13 to hang up the horror rock themes and try something different.
