Review Summary: Cutting through their last shreds of potential
Blood on the Dance Floor was once a relatively household name in the alternative scene, albeit for negative reasons; regardless, people wouldn’t stop talking about the Electro-Pop duo for over half a decade. Now that their place in the scene is slowly whittling away, they’ve switched styles in an attempt to reclaim lost attention. As a result, Blood on the Dance Floor’s eight effort is a complete regression, throwing away the remainder of their enjoyable qualities in favor of poor production values, laughable vocal performances, and underwhelming, bare bones electronics that jump on just about every modern trend in each of the respective genres.
Before all else, the abhorrent decline in production quality needs to be mentioned here. Anything that could have been remotely enjoyable to listen to or even slightly interesting sounds utterly out of place or badly mixed; in particular, the vocals sound so far back in the mix that their melodies consistently sound flat. Even Jayy Von Monroe’s proven vocal abilities are rendered useless here due to him being overly centered in the mix of every song he sings in; due to the mixing, he sounds removed from the rest of the song, as if he’s singing behind a pillowcase. The only tolerable performance mix-wise is in “Sorry Not Sorry”, arguably the only semi-listenable track on the album due to its very minimalistic approach that allows most of the production woes to be overlooked. Dahvie Vanity’s vocal performance as usual is layered halfway to hell, and his attempts at going into a higher range is about as aurally pleasing as two cats humping on a badly tuned clarinet. The lyricism has taken a surprising downgrade as well; even with their more sexually charged tracks such as “Safe Word” there’s nothing outlandish, it takes a subject that should be more intimate and just churns it down to almost an “explanation” level. It breaks any sort of immersion present in the album.
The electronic styles on this record range from attempts at slow Synthwave influenced numbers like “The Age of the Young and the Hopeless”, vocal “hook” driven Dub tracks like “Ringleader”, and a few other styles segmented awkwardly within the album. The problem is that there’s nothing catchy here to justify any of these style changes. While previous album had colorful electronics (their sixth album Bad Blood), or infectious vocal hooks (their seventh album Bitchcraft) to fall back on, this album has none of those qualities. The actual tones used in the bass lines and melodies sound almost amateurish, which is even more surprising given the higher quality samples of previous efforts. It doesn’t help that the songwriting has little to no variation, and that the beat structures are rather identical to each other more often than they should be.
This album represents a monumental fall for a band that, while they were rabidly hated by a lot of people, had beforehand started to make actual strides in quality. Whether this downturn is just due to a lack of funds, or whether it was simply a production style and misshapen ideas that don't jive well remains to be seen. However, at this point, Blood on the Dance Floor have released arguably one of the worst releases in their entire discography.
