Attila - Villain

As with any Attila project, it’s probably easiest to separately discuss the instrumental facet of the music apart from the douchy bravado of frontman Chris Fronzack that often carries it. Attila has never really been anything special for deathcore from an instrumental standpoint, but they’ve at least been decent enough at keeping up with the advances in production that have proven to bring the most out of bands playing in that genre. For the past two or three years, it has seemed that the optimal stylistic and production-related approach to deathcore has been discovered and made wide use of, and Attila do use it here too. The nu metal-influenced simplicity of Attila’s approach to deathcore has been made all the more muscular by the increased thickness of the bass tones, the crunchy clarity of the down-tuned guitars, and thunderous booming of the drums all mixed into deathcore’s optimized presets. What it highlights though, is how dependent Attila are on their production, and when they don’t really sound much heavier than all the rest of the deathcore out there now, their compositional creativities don’t really make up for the ground they’ve lost. The short, one-note slamming of the opening track, “Perdition”, quickly spends all the novelty of the band’s production on a flashy first impression that they don’t really ever ascend past on the rest of the album. There are a few, few, catchy moments on here, like the gang-vocal-led chorus of “It Is What It Is” or the sick, punchy opening riff of “Toxic”. But for the vast majority of the album, the band just flounder though unimaginative nu metal riffs and deathcore’s most typical grooves and breakdowns.

As far as the vocals go, Chris Fronzack has always been a perfectly capable deathcore vocalist with plenty of tangible hedonistic attitude drawn from modern hip hop to give his delivery a signature douchiness, as well as incorporating other techniques to switch up the usual deathcore growl/scream/bleh formula, and on the songs “Bad Habits” and “Subhuman” he does dip his toes into a little bit of that raspy melodic singing that Oli Sykes has made so popular. The results are satisfactory and certainly proof that Fronzack can indeed perform that technique well enough, but the melodies themselves are nothing mind-blowing, and they’re certainly not fitting amid the rest of the album’s remorseless, youthful, energetic indulgence, nor is it enough to spice up the album’s overall instumental typicality. This album, and this band really would be nowhere without that notorious man at the microphone though, and his presence here certainly steals the spotlight again on this album, even if it’s for all the wrong reasons.

Frontman Chris Fronzack’s reputation certainly precedes and prevails over Attila’s music, and for as long as I’ve heard anything from Attila, it’s been beneficial to them, because I sure as hell couldn’t see them raising their head up from the vast sea of deathcore without Fronz’ bold presence and repeated prodding at his detractors. And for the past few albums now especially, Fronz’ persistence as a thorn in the side of his critics with his defiant, bragadocious, and confrontational attitude has been the focus of Attila’s music. And with Villainhere, Fronz is simply exuding the persona he has long come to terms with as being exactly that for the metal community. As much as Fronz’ rebellious charisma has built Attila’s foundation (even if it is on hate-clicks), what he does from album to album really isn’t all too variant. He and Attila have always been about booze, drugs, sex, partying, and flexing all in the name of fun and sticking a middle finger up to anyone trying to police them. While I know Fronz does genuinely live and love (as far as I can tell) the fast lane lifestyle he portrays in his lyrics, I sure hope he’s hamming it up for the cameras on this one because if there’s one thing that’s different about this album from previous Attila albums, it’s how hard Fronz leans into the truly villainous persona he’s thrived on. And it’s pretty ugly at a few spots, the most notable of which is the lyrics of the song, “Still About It”, a callback to their 2012 album, About That Life. The song’s intro features a play on Trump’s infamous pussy-grabbing quote, with Fronz going for “cunt” instead with seemingly no added irony beyond what the album and the band’s reputation already establish. Fronz goes on to basically detail in unappealing how much of a sex addict he is, with tons of degradation and objectification of the women of his sexual pursuit thrown in as well. The song “Manipulate” isn’t too much better though, with Fronz just expressing his will to outdo whoever he’s addressing with this song in a cycle of exactly what the song is titled for.

The rest of the album’s lyricism is basically the lyric trash that wannabe SoundCloud rappers spam on hip hop instrumentals, which is what Attila has always done, but it seems so much less fun this time around. And where it would have been fun, it just seems stale at best or unnecessarily intentionally mean spirited at worst. Like this Fronz seems less like the life of the party and more like the loud annoying asshole that wants to turn the kickback into a rager, calls everyone a pussy, gets way too pushy with the girls there, and kills the vibe by trying too hard to go hard and turning everyone’s party mood off. Like that kind of drunk buffoon with the buzz wearing off near the end of the night, Fronz gets a little bit introspective on a few songs on here like “Subhuman” and “Bad Habits”, asking himself why he’s stuck in the vicious cycles he’s in, but like a true drunk with no intention of actually mending his flaws he never comes to any conclusions, or he shies away from coming to them. He just moans and drums up a little pity party for anyone with any patience left for him to reluctantly oblige to and comfort him.

On this album Fronz leaned a little too hard on the actual villainous aspects of his real-life or (hopefully) stage character like sex addiction, vindictiveness, and degradation of women. Rather than coming off as the exuberant, loveable party animal that just wants to get everyone to stop taking themselves so seriously for a minute, he just comes across as an abusive, selfish asshole more concerned with trying to maintain his reputation as a badass party king than with actually trying to make the party fun for everyone around him. And based on the blandness of the music backing him, it seems like his bandmates eren’t really feeling the vibes he’s putting out there either. This album doesn’t really feel like it’s as much of a party as it is a drunken diatribe from Fronz about what a big shot he is compared to everyone else, how much pussy he supposedly scores, and how much you should be jealous of him. Like anyone actually doing that shit at a kickback, I can’t help but think that for Fronz too it’s coming from a place of insecurity. His band split from Sharptone Records after just one album and released this one independently to almost no hype; I only heard about it the day or two before. With deathcore becoming less lucrative and with more creative bands coming onto a level playing field with Attila at the production booth, and with his rebelious bad-boy shtick growing stale, it seems that Fronz has seen the same writing on the wall Fred Durst saw after Limp Bizkit began to come down from their peak. And now that Fronz has fully revealed the selfishness of his motives all along as he tries to party harder and harder in the futile attempt to keep his buzz up and his band’s buzz alive, it’ll be an interesting, although predictably ugly sight to see how this band handles their numbered days.

Winding down buzz/10