Review Summary: Incomparable tells the story of a band who once had some kind of promise, but ending up wanting to improve but effectively only falling straight on their own back.
For those of you who don’t know Dead by April, let me give you a short retrospect: Dead by April is a band that draws its origins from Gothenburg, Sweden starting our releasing demos in 2007 and releasing their debut self-titled album in 2009. Now they are back with their second studio album entitled “Incomparable”. Now what kind band is Dead by April? According to lead vocalist Zandro their a fusion between metal and boy band pop, this understandably upset a lot of fans. But to be fair, since Zandro joined the band, that’s what it has become.
What critics and fans alike disliked about their debut was that it was overproduced and there were less heavy tracks present than radio friendly ones. Dead by April responded with stating that their new album would blow away anything they’ve done in the past and being much heavier. Heavier? HAHA! That’s the most funny joke I’ve heard in my whole life! If anyone wasn’t happy with their debut, you won’t like this. In fact, you might like it even less because it’s everything but heavy.
Prior to the release of album, 4 tracks had been released: a demo version of “More Than Yesterday”, featured on their Stronger mini-album and “Within My Heart”, “Two Faced” and “Unhateable” (a remade track) from their Within My Heart single. These songs were well written, and it sounded like if Incomparable actually was going to be heavier than their debut... Men were we fooled! They did a pretty clever move, and released all the heavy tracks to the media, leaving us to believe that the album was heavier. They actually fooled us twice, since you need to order the Japanese version of the album to obtain “Unhateable”. As for the rest of the album (besides the remake of “Lost”)… it’s basically only poppy songs, with some of them having not well placed screamed vocals witch sounds like they were put there only to include Jimmie. That’s not to say it’s all bad though, because some of the tracks like “Calling” and “When You Wake Up” are really radio friendly, but not a bad song in general. Sometimes I ask myself why even Jimmie (the screamer) is in the band, as he is present in less than half of the songs on the album.
Their debut features a wide spread of slow and fast songs. That’s not the case with Incomparable. Here is almost every single song mid tempo with some times a bit of screaming to make the song “heavy” and a big ass slow and melodic sing along chorus with cheesy lyrics. The album is generally boring and after the two first tracks “Dreaming” and “Real & True” you can pretty much predict everything that is going to come. The album brings nothing new to the table at all.
As for the band itself, I can’t notice any improvement. The songs are boring, the lyrics are the same with suicidal themes appealing for teenagers, witch in fact is their biggest fan base. The guitars are boring and predictable with a whole lot of simple riffing and acoustic fills. The bass is absent; really like most modern metal bands you can’t hear it at all. The drumming is nothing but average, that’s quite sad since they have a pretty good drummer. The keyboards sounds like they are more important than anything over sounding the guitars if even the vocals at times. As for the vocals… there are basically no screams compared to clean vocals. Witch are both the best and probably most important instruments on this album, and probably the whole band as well.
The only difference between Dead by April and a boy band is (if I may be so straight forward) Jimmie. The screaming vocals is the only thing separating the band from acts like Westlife and the Backstreet Boys. If they would have removed Jimmie, we would have a pretty decent boy band, since they wouldn’t be trying to be something their not. My best advice for Jimmie would be to leave Dead by April and focus on Death Destruction, because Dead by April aren’t going anywhere.
