Review Summary: In spite of popular backlash as of late...
...Dance Gavin Dance's new album is the sound of a bandright, pleasantries over: if you still have the patience to indulge this bullshit, that's your choice of hobby and criticism, constructive or otherwise, has absolutely no business tailoring itself to your consumption.
Jackpot Juicer, the band's final record featuring the tragically deceased Tim Feerick and (one can hope) the disgraced Tilian Pearson, is less a classic case of flop and more a cliché of a cliché of a cliché to the point that anyone still seated in the
fan seats must surely feel a little uncanny about the at once microscopically precise and hypergeneral degree to which their tastes are being pandered to. Stale as anything you will hear this year or any, there is but one extraordinary facet to this album: Pearson, whose long-exhausted dapper fuckboy act had lost its lustre even before he was exposed as a molester (see "Back On Deck" and "Polka Dot Dobbins" for two particular dead-on-arrivals), somehow comes out of things minutely better than the atrophied songwriting and copy-paste guitar schtick proffered by chief Gavin / head dancer Will Swan. The man's once distinctive combinations of twee pentatonics, catchy funk and emotive dissonance are at this point so rote that I struggle to pin down a single song-defining non-interchangeable riff or motif on this album of riffs and motifs. We can scrabble for silver linings all day long, and while, yes, it is good to hear Jon Mess clawing back a little personality from his speedialed meme-scream act (and kudos to the contributions of backup boy Andrew Wells), the material Swan is offering his spokespeople at this point is borderline proactive in its thinness. If you believe the statistics (please do),
Jackpot Juicer is Dance Gavin Dance's longest record to date, a feat that speaks less to the inspirations of the band's creative process and much, much more to the sheer regurgitative banality of their formula. *examines review notes* add some shit about Tilian's overbearingly intense vocal inflections. Y'all know that.
But if it ain't broke then for the love of God can somebody fucking break it.
