Review Summary: see album title
Let’s get this out of the way early; even by modern metalcore standards, it’s difficult to write an album as boring as
Deadweight. I felt strangely offended listening to this album, and that’s a bizarre sensation to have in this style of music. While similar bands are often boring, rarely does an album sound so blatantly postured to avoid risks that it evokes genuine frustration. On this album, Wage War have shown themselves to be a band that knows exactly what buttons to push to churn out cheap, accident-free thrills. Nothing more, and nothing less.
Deadweight is devastatingly derivative, aping its contemporaries so hard that it’s difficult to pinpoint even one remotely original songwriting idea or thought. The riffs sound like Architects, the clean vocals sound like Northlane, the gang vocals sound like August Burns Red-- there is just nothing going on here that similar bands haven’t already done in a better fashion. Breakdowns are the theme here, and there are a ton of them, but having two to three of them in every song diminishes their impact to the point where the band could have instead inserted the Seinfeld bass line and achieved the same effect.
Like everything else about
Deadweight, production and mixing follows metalcore trends of the last five years to a tee. Every instrument is heard crystal clear, double bass drum runs are immaculately spaced, and the big clean-vocal choruses are adjusted to a pitch perfect degree.
Deadweight sounds like a million bucks, but its polished sheen does nothing to add to songs that are already completely devoid of character.
Lyrics are generally juvenile/bordering atrocious, with choruses like “don’t let me fade away/don’t let me fade away/I just can’t make another day/don’t let me fade away/don’t let me fade away/I’ve been torn down to nothing” perfectly bookending every similarly uninspired verse and breakdown. In the faux-emotional closing track “Johnny Cash”, we hear “I want to feel the love you can’t live without/the one that Johnny Cash wrote all his songs about”, as if the band attempted to shoehorn a pop culture reference in at the last minute to make up for the vapid and vague lyricism of the rest of the album.
Simply put, there is no need for an album like
Deadweight to exist in 2017. While this record may be an enjoyable 40 minutes of head bobbing breakdowns and semi-catchy choruses on the surface level, Wage War have crafted an incredibly predictable and un-exciting set of songs that feel like bangers for the sake of writing bangers. For one of the more popular upcoming bands in the metalcore genre,
Deadweight is exactly what the title implies, and that’s a damn shame.
