Review Summary: Compounding mediocrity.
At this point, the passage of time is just starting to feel straight up diabolical. Somehow, four years just came and went since Ocala's beloved pop-punk-meets-metalcore-rockers dropped their absolute trainwreck of an album in the snidely titled
You're Welcome (thanks, I hate it). A five year wait for an abomination of an album so bad that the band could barely bring themselves to incorporate more than two songs from it into their setlist, instead relying on their age-old classics that are now only remembered by the likes of myself who are dangerously on the cusp of turning 30. Surely, the somehow even more insanely titled
Big Ole Album Vol 1 that stealth dropped this week (physical copies only) is able to rectify the mistakes of the past? Well, it's miraculously the band's first glimmer of any real hope in a discography that has steadily been driving itself off of a cliff since 2013's
Common Courtesy, and yet those waiting for a truly solid body of work from A Day to Remember will have to keep waiting.
Let's start out with the positives; "Flowers" is a strong candidate for one of the best songs this band has ever written, period. Lush, alluring melodies are sent careening towards the listener in an absolute earworm of a chorus with Jeremy McKinnon sounding almost uncharacteristically enthusiastic in the vocal booth. The rest of the instrumentation also manages to evoke a summery vibe not too far removed from some of The Story so Far's best work, making it the clear-cut highlight of the record. "All My Friends" also successfully taps into the band's easycore heydays ala' 2009 to the point of it sounding like blatant nostalgia bait, albeit an effective one at that. Goddammit, even the
incredibly on-the-nose Bring Me the Horizon collaboration "Die for Me" (Oliver Sykes and Jordan Fish wrote it before handing it off to ADTR) really has no business being as catchy as it is despite its edgy, middle-school break-up-energy lyricism.
This is sadly where trying to elaborate much about the rest of the album becomes an arduous process. It's not that any of it is as laugh-out-loud, hilariously bad as the worst of
You're Welcome, but more so that it's just so painfully bland and paint-by-the-numbers that it's tough to say much at all. Even the band's attempt at doubling down on their metalcore schtick just falls flat on its face. "To The Death" is a literal Wage War song just sung by a different vocalist, complete with a tough guy
"*** YOU", pre-breakdown callout that almost just sounds like self-parodying at this point. "Miracle" would have been a completely fine substitute here on its own had it not been released almost three years ago, but oh well. The band also somehow manages to find ways to fumble their much more enjoyable pop-punk sound as well with "LeBron" sounding like a stitched together Frankenstein of melodies already used on tracks like "Good Things", "We Got This" and "Life @ 11" from eons ago. As for "Feedback" and its room temperature IQ lyrics; it's hard to say if the band deems it necessary to keep writing duds just for the sake of annoying people or if they genuinely tell themselves
"Yeah that I'll do" after such an endeavor. Regardless,
Big Ole Album Vol 1 commits the cardinal sin of actually throwing in a few tracks that are genuinely worth your time and manages to elicit a few lightbulb moments that make you realize why you probably really enjoyed this band at some point. It's just a damn shame that any sense of identity or individuality gets lost as the band keeps absorbing producers and songwriters that can only accomplish the bare minimum at elevating their material.
