Review Summary: First place at the vanity fair.
It’s really not correct to call Falling in Reverse a band. It’s really more accurate to call it Ronnie Radke with 4 other dudes that you shouldn’t care about, just pay attention to Ronnie. The band never does anything really exciting except for a solo here and there and a couple of interesting riffs such as the duel guitar playing in the title track. It’s a very generic offering from the band. They’re just there to help adjust the spotlight on Radke throughout the song. So, can Radke carry them above average?
Uh, no.
Radke is a good example of a jack of all trades, master of none vocalist. His singing voice is good, although it somehow got whinier over the years. His growls are pretty generic, but serviceable. His rapping has a good, if generic flow. He’s no Aesop Rock, but he’ll get the job done. So, he’s pretty average in every area.
The real problem is in the lyrics. Radke lost the right to self-aggrandizing a long time ago and shouldn’t be bragging about how much better he is than everyone. His lyrical gems include “I’ll gut you like a ***ing avocado,” and “I got that white boy swagger.” Please note they’re from the same song. All this serves is to alienate the average listener from him. Also, some of the lyrics lack a connection to each other. The biggest offender of that is ‘Alone’ in which the rap verses are about addressing the haters while the chorus is about him being alone. It’s a jarring connection.
Songwriting also drags the album down a lot. They can’t go one song without a breakdown somewhere. The most serious offender is ‘Born the Lead’. They transition from one breakdown, to another breakdown, to ANOTHER BREAKDOWN. They actually started to breakdown more than Emmure. Even the ballad, ‘Keep Holding on,’ is not safe from this as they added another inappropriate breakdown at the outro. Aside from that, a lot of the choruses feel homogenous and gets hard to tell them apart.
One thing I can say in the albums favor is that most songs are easy to tell apart, aside from their generic choruses. ‘Game Over,’ uses an 8-bit machine for the verses that’s actually a little fun as Radke talks about life being a video game. ‘Alone’ electronic elements, while horrible, do help it stand out from the other songs. ‘Bad Girls Club” bouncy synth beats and cheerleading chant rip straight from Avril Lavinge’s “Girlfriend’ keeps things a little different. Really, the whole album is a very varied affair. Each song uses something different as a hook from the very wanky ‘Born to Lead’ to the country song ‘Drifter,’ which actually manages to sound more country than most of current country stars.
Overall, it’s a very varied album, but they can’t seem to use any of them correctly. All the band members give average performers and the lyrics are somewhere between horrible and hilariously bad. If they could work on their songwriting and lyrics, then they could turn in a decent album. However, as it is, they are just a really, really bad pop-punk band with some of the most insulting lyrics of this decade and the previous decade. Definitely a contender for worst album of 2013.
