Someone needs to tell the main leaders of post-hardcore that they’re running on fumes. This isn’t just Thrice or The Dear Hunter (whose Color Spectrum is as much of a failed concept as the Alchemy Indexes), but the hollow passion of many of these bands deserves no vindication from the truth. With Major/Minor, Thrice continue with their peers to create these works devoid of direction, purpose, or indication of a bright future for them, for the actual talent of the individuals is unbelievably underutilized and the benighted audience doesn’t want to look another way.
Thrice’s evolution has been interesting, and up to Vheissu one could say they’re still trying, but as Beggars was an indication of the opposite, Major/Minor is the cementing of this. The band was lauded for blending spacey, open sounds with post-hardcore in Vheissu and the Alchemy Indexes, yet now all they do is put generic rock chords next to tremolo picking choruses with extra reverb as if it would be the same, in an opposite kinetic movement from the introverted Beggars. Literally the first five songs could be put on the radio, as the similarities in banality is uncanny; this is not an argument against accessibility. Call It In The Air at least tries to be something more as seen through its darker passages but they act merely as a bridge back to the monotony. Blur is another example of trying to move towards something different, but the motions between verse, pre chorus, chorus, etc. sound horrible, not to mention the track features some pretty horrible counterpoint vocally. Words In The Water is pretty much the last example as the best song on here, sounding most like their latter era with its peaks but not pushing any further so as to surmise progress...“treading water”, as it were.
The rest of the album does little favors to itself by barely switching up the sound to something that sounds like a garage band with more clean guitars and better mixing. Treading Paper, Listen To Me, and Anthology go through the motions of the band’s recent history just with the distinction of elementary builds, unnatural transitions, and actually speaking of transitions Major/Minor has literally no flow to speak of, implying no thought as to what they want to do with the record, especially if closing on Disarmed was the best they could do. You could listen to the tracks in any order with no difference in impact. The drummer uses the same marching rudiment at what seems like the same tempo around four or five times throughout the record and Dustin’s vocals do even less to differentiate between the songs. His vocal melodies still sound distinctly typical of the genre, which is to say they’re beyond predictable, sound whiney, and the lyrics try way too hard to fit with the genre’s amateur rhyming schemes, especially considering he’s 30 and still singing words of a high schooler. Dustin is probably at his worst now, his gruff vocals doing nothing for the vocal power, clear your damn throat man.
The reception of the album is akin to claiming someone naturally cured of an ailment was cured by a miracle of god; it’s truly looking for a way to praise something that isn’t there. Why post-hardcore won’t accept that dead-ends can be avoided by turning somewhere else is beyond me, and how people can still give esteem to these acts, merely enabling the disease, is even further away from reason. It’s not fun, it’s not serious, it moves nowhere, it’s nothing in particular. Music is still evolving, I swear, just not here.
