Review Summary: Please end my suffering.
The last two or so years of the infamous Blood on the Dance Floor have been marked by nothing but turmoil; Jayy Von Monroe rightfully quit, and Dahvie Vanity attempted to branch out into something different (Sinners Are Winners) which failed for painfully obvious reasons. Seeing as how Vanity's only musical source of income was the Blood on the Dance Floor banner, he quickly got his fiancee Fallon Vendetta and reformed the duo, which means I have to sit here and sit through more musical excrement to review just so I can spare other poor bastards from having their ears destroyed.
First off, the musical quality: it has been wallowed down to what is essentially FL Studio presets. While it isn't utter crap, it isn't saying much; it's still mostly the same thing any other person could accomplish in their sleep. It's mixed pretty bad as well; if there's any bassline here, it's completely drowned out by the other electronics and the newfound vocal "tag team" of Dahvie and Fallon. As for vocals, Vanity still sounds like a musically inept chimpanzee who's desperate to go to notes clearly out of his range, and Fallon's voice isn't much of an improvement; it actually sounds like she's trying to rip off people like Ash Costello of New Years Day, which is understandable as they want it to seem like they have some degree of talent here, which they ultimately fail to accomplish. Vanity's rapping is once again even worse than his singing, sounding like a kitten being sodomized by a creature from the stereotypical version of hell. To my surprise, Vanity seemed somewhat underused throughout the single releases (such as "Ashes to Ashes" and "Ghost Story"); it seems as if he knows any semblance of what seems to be talent to him belongs to Fallon, so he puts her in charge of quite a lot of the vocals. As for the songs that AREN'T single releases, Dahvie seems to enjoy trying to rap even though it's been made quite clear that he simply cannot do so. In "From Dreams To Nightmares", he is criminally, straight-up out of tune, making it painful more than all the other tracks to listen to (other than "My Last Breathe", where the music is also pretty out-of-tune). Occasionally, in songs like "The Ocean and The Moon", you can't even understand a single word either of them are saying.
The lyrical quality took quite the nosedive following Jayy's departure; neither Dahvie nor Fallon can create good rhymes to save their lives...or actual lyrics for that matter. This is the third and fatal flaw to Haunted; they seem to not care anymore, as if the band and their music only serve to pay off the legal fees for Dahvie's inevitable trial (and hopefully imprisonment) on charges that will not be discussed here, because not only do I feel uncomfortable talking about it, but I also do not like beating what should have been a dead horse almost ten years ago. Everything within this album just boils down to being solid proof that Haunted is why BOTDF should have stuck to being a broken up band, and what compels them to continue (unless the time of paying off inevitable legal fees finally comes) is as big of a mystery as to why Dahvie hasn't been sent to the slammer yet.
