Review Summary: A fine effort that just falls short of ‘brilliant’, but is still a good skull breaking nonetheless.
Oh come on, don’t look at me like that. it’s not as if I’ve exhumed your long deceased pet dog from the back garden and nailed it to the front of a semi, or given you a nice looking box filled with chocolates only for you to find out that the chocolates are actually filled with excrement. I’m just writing a DevilDriver review. And I do confess to you that DevilDriver are my favourite band because the four artists that make up DevilDriver have this innate ability to combine their entire music arsenal into one rolling juggernaut of sound that is wild yet somehow controlled and planned to the last little detail, whilst still delivering their material with an enthusiasm and desire that has rarely wavered in their ten years as a band. So I will be as objective as possible but be aware that I may start waxing lyrical about them. If this happens please do a Jack Nicholson and pick up that fire axe to give me some severe correction.
This is a band that have spent a very long time trying to shake off the shackles of Dez Fafara’s previous band Coal Chamber, who looked a lot like the result of a high speed collision between a Research facility for Sexually transmitted diseases and a ghost train and sounded like an autistic child repeatedly banging his head against a radiator. And I will still admit however that I do like to listen to Coal Chamber because they were the first band I really listened to that really got me anywhere near interested in Heavy Metal so I can at least give them some credit for that, although that’s like giving credit for to a soldier for fighting in a world war when in reality he was there for about two days before being shot in the arse and having to be sent home to stitch up hi six new anal sphincters.
And Dez’s new project didn’t get off to a great start with their first album, the imaginatively named ‘DevilDriver’ (which must have taken at least seven minutes to think up, leaving a whole day in the office of thumb twiddling and forced bathroom trips). While Dez Fafara successfully paved the way for his development into the world of Heavy Metal, the album itself had largely dull song writing, excruciating vocals that still sounded like The Cookie Monster being forced into a wood chipper, and uninspired musicianship and was happy to coast along at high speed like a runaway oil tanker heading for a seal sanctuary. It did have a few likeable songs though (Cry for me Sky, Swinging the Dead, I could Care Less), so at least the ship in question doesn’t have Tom Cruise and Sandra Bullock on board.
But then something incredible happened. Dez Fafara suddenly thought “you know what? Let’s just f**king go for it”, and DevilDriver gave us ‘The Fury of our Makers Hands’, which saw every single element of the instrumentation and vocals playing off of each other beautifully and pummelling us into submission with track after brilliant skull shattering track. If there was a good analogy for being continuously beaten into a pulp by five Mosher midgets all named Steve armed with crowbars, then this was it.
They didn’t really build on this though with ‘The Last Kind Words’ and although it did give one of their notable songs in ‘Clouds Over California’, it’s a struggle to pick any other superb songs from what is largely an average collection (I would say ‘Horn of Betrayal’ and possibly ‘These Fighting Words’, but anyone else want to make a suggestion?....), and the album as a whole felt like one massive stalling of the car engine in the middle of rush hour traffic.
Step forward Pray For Villains. If DevilDriver needed a kick up its considerable backside with a diving boot then the opening track does just that. The title track is what we like to call in Merry Olde England a ‘Ripsnorter’, which probably sounds like a pig addicted to cocaine. Funnily enough that is what the Dez’s vocals come across as sounding like on occasion when you listen to DevilDriver, but as far as opening tracks go this song is outstanding. Fantastic harmony between the respective musicians, Dez Fafara doesn’t do his usual trick of either getting drowned out by the Broecklin vs Kendrick vs Spreitzer death match or trying too hard to sound demonic when really it comes across like mixing gravel in an electric blender, and the four minutes it clocks in at is over before you can spin round and shout, “Hey, who stole my trousers while I wasn’t looking?. I only just put those on this morning”.
But did DevilDriver simply blow their load all over our faces too early like a nervous teenager with a premature ejaculation problem? Not entirely, but as much as they tried to think about Dick Cheney squatting on a glass table whilst naked, a little bit still came out because the rest of the album is very good as a collective but ultimately is not as great as its ambition. Unlike ‘The last Kind Words’ though, there are more good tracks than simply mediocre ones. Tracks one through eight are nicely executed, have interesting structures and shifts of tone and pitch, and are perfectly placed in the running order. The way in which each song seems to compliment the previous and next track gives me the impression that DevilDriver were toying with the idea of a concept album. As is want to happen though, there are times when Dez does become overwhelmed by the technical brilliance of the guitar and drum work, as his vocal is often drowned out and his lyric writing skills are akin to asking a three year old to write the communist manifesto on a basketball in marmite. Besides this small nit-pick which is like trying to bring down an angry tiger with a herring, the opening eight songs are immense in scale and almost prefect in execution, and ‘Pray for Villains’, ‘Fate Stepped In’, and ‘Resurrection Boulevard’ would be my personal choices for top songs from these eight.
But then….well, how can I put this. Think of the album as a jar of biscuits and DevilDriver and possibly yourself the listener as the fat kid who just doesn’t get the idea that he should probably do Gym class more often. Upon reaching the cookie jar he proceeds to snarf down all of the tasty biscuits like the chocolate chip cookies and the custard creams, but by the time he gets two thirds of the way down the jar, he’s left with all of the Pink wafers (They are NOT a F**king biscuit!!) and the tasteless stale digestives that nobody touches so they have probably been in there for ninety years and have their own agrarian societies growing on them.
After the track ‘Waiting for November’ reaches its ends, ‘Pray for Villains’ takes a leap towards the ledge of fantastic but misses and ends up taking a trip to jagged rock country as it begins to collapses under its own size and sprawling ambitions. There are a two or three tracks in the albums second half which could have easily been cut and not made a dent in the overall finished product. ‘In the Cards’, ‘Another Night In London’, and ‘I see Belief’ are dull, irritating, and senseless in that order, a bit like having Keanu Reeves and Celine Dion living in a house made out of *** and razor blades. The last track in particular is a mess of musicians and vocalist fighting for the bragging rights which is really out of keeping with the rest of the albums almost seamless interaction.
If you bought the special edition with DVD included however, the album saves itself with its four bonus tracks, which should really have been put in place of the three songs I mentioned because they all have the tight song writing and delivery that are a little lacking in the albums ‘official’ second half.
So in terms of summary I would say that ‘Pray for Villains, while not being their best album as a whole (‘Fury of Our Makers Hands’), I would say that it comes a close second as their follow up ‘Beast’ had ‘Fury’s’ intensity but had same kind of level of song as ‘Last Kind Words’, and we’ve already talked about the never to be mentioned again first album. No I’m serious NEVER bring it up again.
Pray For Villains is probably way too big for its own good with the bonus edition clocking in at 17 tracks, and its attempt at scale sometimes leads to a lot of fancy ideas with not an awful lot of impact. But the core elements of the album and the majority of its songs are an immersive experience, and when it does manage to pull off its allusions to grandeur it is breath taking. A fine effort that just falls short of ‘brilliant’, but is still a good skull breaking nonetheless.
