Review Summary: No slim amount of good moments in anything can produce a graceful whole.
Remember a time when you played a video game and heard a fairly engaging song, only later to wonder what the hell it was?
Burnout 3: Takedown (arguably the finest racing game ever made) was the culprit and that
"fairly engaging" track was entitled
"Broken Promises"; a song which sounds as if it belonged on the
Spider-Man 2 soundtrack (both having been released the same year too). This band did not last long; in fact, they petered out before anyone could figure out much about them. For the genre of music this album associates with (emo), it sometimes has the perfect balance between melancholia amidst a slight glimmer of hope. However, on most occasions,
Moonlight Survived can be incredibly dull and depressing in the most agonizing of ways humanly-imaginable.
To start off the album,
"Stratus" is an okay song. The band chose it to be their lead single, dropped a music video for it in the process, and the song sounds very amateurish, even the video feels lazy and poorly-realized. The next issue kicks in with
"The Patient", the song sounds like it would be good at first glance... but then the god-awful vocals arrive; with an irritating echo-effect overtop the delivery of lead vocalist, Jeremy Griffith, it instantly becomes a headache-inducing bore of a track. Thankfully,
"Broken Promises" arrives and actually breathes some life into this record. Moments in Grace would have been wise to pick this song as their single and ride with it to (potential) stardom, for it is strangely compelling, featuring a powerful chorus, and a brilliantly-relaxed pace throughout.
Songs such as
"Broken Promises" are scarce to non-existent though.
"The Blurring Lines of Loss" pops up later on and offers up a moderately-decent song, but maybe only triggered by the fact that it also drops the line
"broken promises" to reignite interest. Despite the vocals sounding drowsy during the verses, the chorus is gripping and the instrumentals are varied enough to maintain intrigue. However, at the end of the album, nothing much more of any positive note lands anywhere else. Almost everything feels overstretched. For instance,
"Don't Leave", the longest song on the album (by a mere few seconds), is noticeably sluggish right off the hop because the vocalist continues to hold on words so often that it comes across as pretentious. In order to switch it up, songs of a condensed-runtime would have worked wonders; even though
"My Dying Day" is rather piercing to the senses at times, it does feature some undeniably catchy hooks laden within.
Though there are some bright moments to be heard throughout this deeply-flawed debut, the repetition eventually seeps in entirely and wears this record out to a screeching halt. Songs such as
"We Feel the Songs" and
"Distant and Longing Light" drag on until put to a sudden, abrupt end. The band seemingly gets worse and worse as the album progresses because the songs eventually bleed into one-another. This is truly a shame. These gentlemen did find a unique sound in songs like
"Broken Promises" and
"The Blurring Lines of Loss" (to a lesser extent,
"My Dying Day" and
"My Stunning Bride" as well), but what does that matter when the majority of the journey is almost entirely unsavory to begin with?
This is a brutally whiny, painfully naive record that gets dull fast. Nearly every single song is instantaneously forgettable thanks to an overdependence on
"emotionally epic" moments over cohesive tracks that actually carry weight to them. At the end of it all, hardly anything about this album feels genuine or even entertaining in any regard. It is embarrassingly mopey, angst-ridden rubbish that crashes and burns before the overlong 45-minute mark is finally up.
"Broken Promises" may be a great song nevertheless, but that does not make up for the monotony of it all (being combined into one
pain in the neck of a record).
