Motionless in White - Disguise

I have made repeatedly clear on here that I love me some good, sweet, sugary, delicious, indulgent, so-not-high-brow alt metal that many wou classify as pop metal. I’m an open minded boy and I don’t think liking bitterly harsh industrial DSBM noise doom means I can’t like the sweeter side of metal too. And that’s where Motionless in White enter the stage of 2019.

I definitely remember Motionless in White’s 2017 effort, Graveyard Shift, more fondly for its cherry-picked, punchy, and well-produced alternative/nu-metalcore bangers like “Untouchable”, “Queen for Queen”, “Voices”, and “Eternally Yours” than it definitely was as a whole. But even if Graveyard Shift wasn’t any kind of alternative metal or metalcore masterpiece in its entirely, I was actually looking forward to just getting a few more of those types of standout tracks from Disguise, just to add few more blood-pumping bangers to add to my workout personal playlist, or perhaps even the faint hope of a shift toward focusing the more direct, energetic types of ragers that stood above the crop on Graveyard Shift.

Well, sometimes hopes and dreams do come true; Motionless in White go more fully into the nu metal and metalcore-infused alternative metal on Disguise than they did more occasionally on Graveyard Shift. And while this album is still not without some of its own and some of Graveyard Shift’s residual issues and probably not sitting too well with fans of the band’s more longtime fans who got into them through Creatures or Infamous, this is definitely a more fertile creative space for the band to draw power from and thrive in than the desiccating fields of generic metalcore within their crop they had already harvested dry.

The opening title track finds the band pretty close to their sweet spot of nu metalcore and alternative metal with some already Chester Bennington-esque vocals with distortion effects that sound lifted from Hybrid Theory and jumpdfuckup groove that continues what the band set out to do on Graveyard Shift. It’s a tightly composed track with little fat to trim that sets the tone for the rest of the album’s alt. metalcore bangers well.

The few tracks that follow at the beginning of the album definitely carry that momentum well even if they do expend the majority of the album’s firepower kind of early. The subsequent “Headache” features some Slipknot-inspired record scratches and high pitched whirs to enhance a more suspensefully menacing mood. But the chorus’ dark melody really makes the song. “C0de” is a bouncy industrial metalcore tune with a bit of balance from its more pop-influenced alt metal chorus, which gets perhaps just a tad repetitive, but it’s not enough to diminish the song’s enjoyability. The vicious “Thoughts and Prayers” is probably the best moment on the album with its relentless metalcore verses and its defiant melodic chorus. It’s more in line with the standard of metalcore, but the aggression is fitting for the song’s subject matter and the band show that they have the capacity to take on the second wave’s trademark clean/harsh approach with their industrial and alternative metal flavoring. “Holding on to Smoke” sounds like an extra punchy and metalcore-influenced Breaking Benjamin song during its emotionally exhausted choruses, which is, again, where Motionless in White sound at their optimum.

Even the album’s later songs like the woah-laden “Legacy” (which sounds like an Imagine Dragons song during its choruses, except with much more energy) and the Breaking Benjamin-ish power balladry of “Another Life” that stretch out a bit too long on their pop formulas still manage to contribute at least to the tonal diversity of the album and really aren’t all that bad either at accomplishing their intended purpose.

The band also partake in their usual samples of horror-inspired gothic metalcore for good measure on the spookily string-supplemented back-to-basics “Undead 2: The Tale of the Mightnight Ride” and the pair of very Rob Zombie-esque songs, “Broadcasting from Beyond the Grave” and “Brand New Numb”, which all provide a welcome break from the rest of the more typically styled and structured songs among them.

The closing song, “Catharsis”, is unfortunately just a bit too drab of a traditional alternative metal closer after all the fireworks that precede it, and it’s definitely not a very conclusive way to finish the album off. But luckily it’s not enough of a landing stumble to negate the showmanship of the rest of the album’s routine.

While Disguise might not even hit the same high points that Graveyard Shift’s best moments did and while it definitely comes with its own moments of nu metal cheesiness that the band showed themselves to be susceptible to on its predecessor, it is the more consistent album of the two. And I don’t think this was nearly as bad of a jump into the deep end of late 2000’s alt/nu metal as it definitely could have been. For the most part, the band play to the strengths of the genre and their own. I’m sure there will be ample preexisting detractors as well as many within the band’s fan base that decry the significant increase in the pop-influenced structuring on this album and the obviousness of the band’s influences worn so upfront right there on their sleeve. But they’ve never been shy about channeling their favorite bands, and this time they’re at least playing to their refined strengths so that their costume-changing masquerade is at least very well-designed. While I will agree that the “pop sensibility” probably makes the album a bit too formulaic as a whole, I still think this is a step in the right direction for Motionless in White: away from the blatant Antichrist Superstarmimicry and early Bullet for My Valentine knock-offs, and toward a largely abandoned but open style that they can prove to still have plenty of vibrant, explosive potential. I think another tweak of the balance to emphasize the power of the band’s metalcore foundations more so that the pop flavors don’t drown them out would be a logical and easy step toward the ideal Motionless in White album, and this album is definitely a fine stepping stone in that path that the band hopefully continue toward.

Just a little bit to the left/10