Review Summary: A sturdy wall built to hinder progress.
There comes a time when certain musicians reach a point in their careers where they show the pinnacle and prime of their art. Seldom are there times when bands or artists are able to stay relevant or progressive with the set of tools and ideas that they pioneered themselves on. When it comes to the space of commercial music in particular, often musicians have to adapt and reshape themselves to stay afloat in their endeavors, with few exceptions of course. If the Underground, post-hardcore, metalcore musical scene had a quintessential ‘five minutes of fame’ band, it would probably be The Color Morale. Fronted by vocalist Garret Rapp, The Color Morale reached a capstone and peak in the spotlight with their Junior LP Know Hope and despite gaining a decently sized following post that record, they have yet to capture that viral attention in a scene where it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stand out and become popular. Desolate Divine marks the band's fifth full length record and despite the necessity for a ground up change in The Color Morale’s sound, this album is one of their most lackluster and unmemorable to date.
Desolate Divine opens with a punchy low-tuned guitar riff that is a staple for the band and it’s what marks one of this album's major flaws. There’s a constant, permeating sound on Desolate Divine that The Color Morale has at this point been defined by: A frequent dichotomy between their metal-core inspired rhythm sections and screams and their melodic choruses and lead guitar riffs. While it may have been acceptable for this to be their leaning force back in 2011, when the band stood out because of the remarkable quality of their sound in the early developments of the genre, the rest of their peers have now caught up and the reliance on these moments are overdone and oversaturated not only in the band’s history but in the entirety of post-hardocre and metalcore. And this dichotomy has become so present in what has defined The Color Morale that it’s consumed the band’s identity and has left them indistinguishable from even themselves.
What hits this home is how difficult it is to find a highlighting moment on the record. Nearly all of the songs open up one of two ways, with a low tuned guitar riff or a high string melody that all sound strikingly similar to one another. Most of the hooks and verses share core thematic ideas and sounds as well. With some songs essentially just being better versions of others in tracks like ‘Walls’ and ‘Misery Hates Company’ it seems as if The Color Morale went into this project with 2 real ideas and just remixed them into a 40 minute full-length album.
On top of this the band continues with this generic, emo, pun-based, play-on-words lyricism that is of the same quality of a teenager who is attending their first Poetry Slam. With song titles like ‘Fauxtography Memory,’ ‘Misery Hates Company,’ and ‘Home Bittersweet Home’ one can’t help but feel this sense of forced emotion and pandering to the “nobody understands me” mentality. While the band has followed these trends in the past, their previous endeavors seemingly had more effort and genuine uniqueness in them with lines that were both decently poetic and relatable. But here it seems like a lot of the lines were pulled out of a book of generic down-to-earth, motivational or depressing quotes and at points they just feel thrown in as filler lines.
When it comes down to it, a few decent singles and tracks won’t save a project that ultimately falls flat because of how similar every song on the album is to one another and how commonplace and generic it is in the band's discography as a whole. This sound that The Color Morale has nearly bled dry from their five albums is beginning to wane and limp. If they want to stay relevant as artists, they need to stop reusing the same messages, songs structures and themes and start developing a new color.
