Fact: If you’re a band that has a non-traditional style, you’re going to have hater. (I know this from personal experience, seeing as there are just some bands that I cannot stand.) And so is the case with Swedish metal band Dead by April, especially with the release of the second album “Incomparable”.
For those of you who are unfamiliar, Dead by April is a metal band, but one whose calm vocals and lyrics are oddly reminiscent of The Backstreet Boys, ‘NSYNC, and all the other boy bands of the 90s. What you have with DbA is a combination of boy band meets In Flames, with the occasional synth thrown in for good measure (it’s European, so the use of synth is kind of expected to be honest).
Originally released on September 21st of late year, the album consists of a slightly different line-up than the first (they dropped from 5 members to 4 and lost 2 original members), and was met with less that favorable reviews from critics and haters alike, many of whom compared the album to garbage, and deemed it “unfit to be called metal”. But that’s not to say that it didn’t receive good reviews as well, Swedish magazines ranked it in the top albums of 2011.
But I’m reviewing the 2012 edition, complete with 3 extra tracks(!), titled as the “Mystery Version”. So now, we have a 13 track album released as a 16 track album, even though only 1 of the new songs is actually a NEW song. And that song is, you guessed it, “Mystery”. The other 2 songs came with the singles when you bought them off of iTunes. This was just a way to get people to buy them all at once I’m guessing, but still highly unnecessary.
Now, other than the above stated flaw, the album WAS actually pretty good, and the band does a really good job of mixing the two completely opposite styles, much better than they did on their self-titled first album (still my favorite of the two though). To me, the biggest flaws in the music itself is the fact that a lot of the songs on this album have the “woe is me”, angsty lyrics that your average high school freshman keeps secretly tucked away in a notebook after his/her boy/girlfriend breaks up with him/her (come on, we’ve all been there before, don’t deny it). Luckily for listeners, these lyrics are actually catchy, so you needn’t feel AS depressed when singing along. (I’m actually reminded of Hawthorne Heights in a way…)
For those of you wondering, the most angsty tracks are probably “Real & True” and “You Should Know”.
Once you get passed the angst on the select tracks, you notice a more upbeat feeling on the remainders, which provides even more of that good musical balance DbA brings to the table.
Between the mixture of calm songs, and heavy songs, almost all of which are fast-paced, the best tracks actually tend to be some of the calmer ones, and those are my 3 key tracks to this album:
“Dreaming”
“Within My Heart”
“Lost”
The question I now have to address is “Is it better than their first album?”, and honestly, I can’t say. Personally, I think the first album was better, but that’s a very biased opinion. Both albums have strong points, the balance they have being this albums, as opposed to the heaviness being the first’s. So all in all, it comes down to each listener to decided which is better for themselves. Another solution is to just throw them both on shuffle and not give a damn. Works every time.
Final rating: 3 1/2 out of 5
Dead by April – “Calling” Music Video
-JC