Review Summary: A surprisingly solid album that acknowledges their formative years.
In This Moment are a frustrating band to listen to. While I can’t say they’ve ever made anything beyond the realms of enjoyable, over the years they’ve displayed a tapestry of idle potential that’s gone largely unchecked. To put it bluntly; if In This Moment had been fronted by a dude back in the day, they’d have never got off the ground with their serviceable, albeit generic metalcore songwriting. However, Maria is not only a charismatic frontwoman with boatloads of magnetism, she’s also incredibly gifted – being able to control her diverse vocal range and emote and create some semblance of distinction from the beige instrumental work being offered to her. Yet, the operative word in all of this is “idle” potential, because even on In This Moment’s best records – taking out the interesting visual aesthetics – the band have a lot of trouble keeping things cohesive. When the band do have their heads screwed on and offer Brink tracks that upraise her wistful performances, In This Moment are actually a formidable group. What makes this all the more frustrating is the band haven’t been able to proliferate that scintillating potential to its fullest, worse, they’ve actually regressed and failed to show any of those promising assets for nearly a decade now. I will admit,
Black Widow had a couple of hopeful moments on it, but overall, the album was thirty minutes too long and it was mostly packed out with vacuous mainstream-baiting filler tracks that created overwhelming ennui the more you went back to it. Of course,
Black Widow looks like a real accomplishment next to the band’s proceeding efforts,
Ritual and
Mother: two albums that echo a lot of what’s wrong with Thirty Seconds to Mars these days. These are the kinds of records that spend more time trying to convince you they’re moody and mature forms of high art, when in reality they’re just nauseatingly shallow records with next to nothing going for them.
And so, given how much I reviled their last two albums, it seems somewhat ironic (or sadistic depending on your outlook) I’m here again, talking about yet another one of their albums. As it happens
Godmode fell into my inbox and out of morbid curiosity, I hit the play button on “The Purge”, just to see where the band was going this time around. To their credit, the song grabbed my attention immediately. “The Purge” is heavy, succinct, and it somehow successfully blends their abrasive sensibilities with a lot of the gloomy and cinematic atmospherics from recent years. The overarching framework for
Godmode opts for an industrial undercurrent with chugging guitars and big, gauzy choruses akin to a Deftones song: grand, melancholic pay-offs with a thick atmosphere saturating the capacious grooves and dejected guitar melodies. This worthwhile writing style manages to hold up for two-thirds of the tracklisting as well, only faltering with anodyne interruptions. However, given the band’s volatile writing habits in the past, this hardly comes as a surprise. What is a shock though; these patchy tonal inconsistencies aren’t all that bad on here. The main issues befalling the album stem from the band slotting back into their modern-day writing habits, forcing awkward electronics and generic pop melodies into songs that have no place being there. Admittedly the lion’s share of this happens in the last third of the album, where “Everything Starts and Ends with You”, “Damaged” and “Fate Bringer” unnaturally twist jarring ideas that don’t form well together. The difference between the few innocuous fumbles on here and
Ritual say, is the creative decisions are pretty cohesive throughout and nowhere near as egregious, at worst they’re just boring.
Still, I’m quite surprised with how
Godmode has turned out. For nearly a decade now the band have shown no indication they’re capable of writing a worthwhile album anymore. It doesn’t say much, but
Godmode is their best album since
Blood. I lightly touched on it before, but Deftones, and more specifically Chino’s ghostly signature vocal style plays an important role here. The influence is somewhat brazen in execution, but it plays well into In This Moment’s recent records – which for all their dire flaws, atmosphere was chief among the slither of pros. The band’s experimentation with atmosphere comes into fruition on
Godmode, and uses their old, heavier style in the process. It’s not an amazing album, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction. It also helps that
Godmode clocks in at a merciful forty minutes, an issue that has plagued their albums for years now. If you’re a fan of the band’s older sound but didn’t gel with what they’ve been doing since 2014, give this a go. It definitely recognises their past and implements it with their newer ventures to create something promising for future albums, if they’re willing to hold the line.
