Review Summary: Sleepy Tortoise vs Coughing Robot Tortilla XI: it’s our fourth singer!
Talking about the long and tumultuous history of Dance Gavin Dance is infinitely more exciting than discussing anything off of their eleventh studio album
Pantheon. This is a band that has now cycled through
four different singers, two of whom were benched, brought back and jettisoned out of the band again shortly after. Throughout the band’s 20-year lifespan, an exhaustive list of guitar players, bassists and singers have come and gone – their drummer went on a brief stint in rehab back in 2021 and the following year, their bass player Tim Feerick tragically passed away after overdosing. That same year, their then-lead singer Tilian Pearson was outed as being somewhat of a sex pest; ten years after the guy he replaced was caught scamming money from his fans to perpetuate his drug addiction. This is all messy stuff, and yet for the longest time a lot of the drama surrounding the band only deepened the lore and excitement around what quickly became the post-hardcore equivalent to 1980’s-hair-metal, with all the sex, drugs and rock-and-roll to go with it.
This was mostly “fine” in the early days of the band (before things would implode dramatically a few years ago) when their music felt decidedly fresh. A proggy, RnB-tinged take on the musical stylings carved out by the likes of Thrice and Circa Survive was a revelation in the late 2000’s. Dueling vocals and guitars juxtaposed against whacky time-signature changes and unconventional song structures; betwixt 2009’s
Happiness pivoting the band’s sound further down the realm of jazz fusion and 2011’s
Downtown Battle Mountain II sprinkling in some funk, soul and metalcore flourishes for good measure – the band had cultivated a sound that was wholly unique and then just ran with it. For every album and line-up change, there was always an immediate hook to each new entry in the DGD discography that helped differentiate it from what came before, that is, until the band’s creative spark ran dry nearly a decade ago. From
Mothership and onwards, Dance Gavin Dance has been steadily operating on autopilot – the pop-centric approach to their songwriting was starting to grow stale amidst a litany of non-album singles and recycled ideas and by the time we arrived at
Jackpot Juicer in 2022 and the two (technically four) subsequent singles that shortly followed, the fatigue had firmly cemented itself.
So what’s there to really be said about
Pantheon? In all honesty: very little. Dance Gavin Dance is now effectively a soulless husk pumping out highly manufactured slop that goes out of its way to make it sound like it shamelessly came off of a conveyor belt. Andrew Wells – who’s now taking up the lead singer mantle – tries his best to make it sound like he cares while mostly coasting off of familiar vocal melodies and ideas penned by Tilian on prior records. Worse though is Jon Mess, who sounds really annoying throughout the bulk of this album. His attempts at some more…
zesty(?) sounding screams are far more irritating than delightful and his schtick has more than overstayed its welcome. I’ll try to go out of my way and dissect some of the songs here on offer, but a large chunk of
Pantheon is just a plain drag to get through. Opener “Animal Surgery” has a decent-ish chorus and some ear-catching leads but like so much of this album it’s a track that simply has nothing to say in a sea of now 100+ recorded DGD songs.
I wish I could extrapolate on anything from the ho-hum singles “All The Way Down” or “Midnight At McGuffy’s”, but they trudge by at such a snails-like pace and do a wonderful job of padding out the already excessive track-listing and length. Why on earth the band insists on creating hour-long full-lengths sandwiched in between non-album singles year in-year out is beyond me. The most note-worthy moments on offer are the ones that just border on laughable, like Jon Mess’ spoken-word-esque screaming in the verses of “A Shoulder To Cry On”, which sounds like a drunken attempt at imitating Jordan Dreyer from La Dispute. Oh, and Andrew also belts out a line somewhere about being “tired of the virtue-signaling”. Good lord. Then there’s Will Swan’s vocoded, autotuned singing on “The Conqueror Worm”, which also winds up sounding like an absolute earsore.
It’s not all bad, though: “The Robot with Human Hair Rebirth” and “Strawberry's Daughters” are genuinely two of the better tracks this band has penned in a good minute. Sounding like an ode to the band’s earlier work with upbeat melodies and lusher guitar passages – hell even Kurt Travis shows up briefly on the latter as an added boon. “The Peak of Superstition” also brings some pleasant pizzazz to the proceedings while still sounding like a paint-by-numbers DGD-track, just good luck trying to stomach the absolute snoozefest of a back-half on this album to get there. Dance Gavin Dance are now well past the point of being creatively bankrupt and the few detours they attempt here just fall flat on their face (“Space Cow Initiation Ritual” brazenly tries to embody some Daft Punk-esque swagger to no avail). Will Swan may very well have broken world records in how many songs he can record guitars for but his eponymous subgenre really isn’t cutting it anymore. If you can still somehow put up with another 60 minutes of “swancore” in the year of our lord and saviour 2025, by all means have at it. Just do yourself a favor and immediately wash your ears with anything Dance Gavin Dance put out during their infancy and remind yourself of the incredibly fun group they once were, even if the band’s morals ought to be seriously questioned at this point. That, or just listen to whatever Kurt Travis is up to nowadays.
