Review Summary: The cleaner sections of the album barely surpass the intensity of a praise-and-worship tune, and the heavy moments fall short of even the stiffest popcore breakdowns.
Let's be honest, it's been a while since the broader metal/alternative scene has taken TDWP seriously.
The Act was a well put together pseudo-pop effort with interesting departures from the usual metalcore-gone-radio formula, but failed to re-capture the interest of their primary fanbase. This was clearly not their goal, as many bands seek to expand their horizons and attract a new base of fans as opposed to trying to satisfy those they've already satisfied with previous releases. It's an unpopular route to go sometimes, blazing your own trail, but it is the way that Prada chose. Unfortunately for them,
Color Decay bodes far worse prospects for them than their previous effort. The majority of the cleaner sections in the album barely surpass the intensity of a high energy praise-and-worship tune and the heavy moments mostly fall short of even the stiffest popcore breakdowns. Gone is the desperate quality Jeremy DePoyster's vocals that gave preceding records a sense of urgency and discontent, with the band opting rather for a clean, safe imitation of Oli Sykes' cleaner hooks, and while Mike Hranica remains potent in his own desperate delivery, he cannot control the pulse of the band by himself. Dating back to the
8:18 days, Hranica was being given less and less limelight as the band attempted to shift their identity from a unipolar front to a bipolar one and
Color Decay is no different, featuring a more-or-less 50-50 split. The rhythm section in some tracks such as "Salt", "Watchtower" and "Hallucinate" have some taste to them, but largely fail to redeem
Color Decay from the mind-numbing amount of drag throughout the rest of the record. This drag actually intensifies as the album progresses, crescendo-ing into the driest saga of the 12, "Cancer", a cookie-cutter finale laden with heroic conclusive chords and melancholic acoustic guitar.
It was never solely about making the fans content, but a staple in TDWP's career has been their mastery of controlled aggression: allowing the music to ebb and flow between chaos and melody, playing the Jekyll and Hyde game to perfection. This iteration of the band has displayed no such desire to maintain this reputation, instead focusing on a torrential downpour of uplifting choruses and low-wattage ballads to in hopes to buoy their most recent effort into any level of Billboard of considerations they can get. Fans know not to count on TDWP for consistency at this point, and
Color Decay certainly reinforces that point. Proceed with caution and keep your expectations low and you might just find yourself surprised a time or two, but unless you've been seeking out 12 tracks of half-baked pop-core, that is about the most you can expect from
Color Decay.
