Motionless in White - Graveyard Shift

Some people are of the mindset when they get older and start enjoying more fringe-dwelling music that they have to treat the kinds of music that they might have enjoyed in their early years of music listening as just their entry phase and sometimes even cut all ties with it, pretending to never have affiliated with it. I mention this as a preface to my own personal taste for a good deal of my entry music not being soiled by time or by finding more deep-dwelling music; I still enjoy the alternative metal of bands like Breaking Benjamin and Bullet for My Valentine that got me into heavy music years ago, albeit less frequently as a result of the growth of that seedling of my music library into a hefty oak of all kinds of shit. I could get into the messy details of my opinions of the principles of expanding music taste and retrospective attitudes towards old taste as a growing music listener, but that would get long and off topic. The point is, I have no default objections to alternative metal and I don’t think that I have to shun it to continue to enjoy other music and grow my tastes, which allows me to garner some enjoyment from this new Motionless in White album. Now before this starts sounding like I loved the album, I didn’t. I enjoyed the parts of it that I think work the alternative metal angle well, “Queen for Queen”, “Untouchable”, and “Eternally Yours” being the only real standouts as successes in this department. The rest of the album bounces around these awkward Manson/Slipknot-esque gothic influences in the same general alternative metal formula with some mixed results. While the punchy, nu metal production is a godsend for this album, the thing is also littered with dozens of unappetizing melodies and corny lyrics, “Necessary Evil” taking the cake on that one. At its best, the album has some well-mixed alternative metal headbangers that make more possible getting that last set in at the gym; at its worst it’s a poorly seasoned stew of goth-y influences in a bland alternative metal broth that you really just pick out the meat from. 

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