Review Summary: This is not what heaven feels like.
What makes The Dirty Nil stand out in a sea full of mediocre pop punk bands is their strong and energetic instrumentation and their knack for anthemic and memorable hooks. However, their fourth album,
Free Rein to Passions, is the first time their music has taken a noticeable dip in quality.
Again, what made this band standout is considerably lacking, causing many of the songs here to end up being completely forgettable.
Nicer Guy sounds like the band is on autopilot, with a chorus containing a lethargic hook and instrumentation that does nothing to keep my attention. A good chunk of the tracklist falls into this same problem, leading to the album seeming mostly uninspired. Even when the band decides to show off some of their creative instrumentation with solid and energetic riffs in songs such as
Land of Clover and
Blowing Up Things in the Woods, everything else about these tracks fails to capture the spark of their lively and fiery previous work.
Due to
Free Rein to Passions missing the band's usual strengths, their shortcomings have become ever so more apparent and harder to ignore. Their lyrics are just not very good. There is nothing more to them other than what is there on the surface; they are painfully immature, and most significant of all, the lyrics contain little to no charm. The perfect example of this is the track
Stupid Jobs as it encapsulates all of their faults in lyric writing. Even when they attempt something a bit more meaningful, like with the closer,
The Light, The Void and Everything, they still greatly miss the mark. The closer is about the brevity of life yet still manages to say nothing at all interesting.
However, to say that there are no points where the band's talent shines through is a complete lie. The album begins blowing the doors down with the vigorous
Celebration, a track full of strong metallic riffs and an anthemic chorus. The title track,
Free Rein to Passions, is too full of the unbridled energy that was often found in previous albums, and the song reaches an explosive end with intense drums and tremolo riffs.
Overall,
Free Rein to Passions largely feels uninspired. The riffs aren’t always there, the choruses land flat, and the lyrics lack both thought and character. Even when a song does not have one of these problems, the void that the other two create is glaring, and it is hard to overlook it. Regardless, not the whole album is dull, and the occasional blast of energy is as good as some of their strongest material.
