Vices

Daytona doesn’t just have Indy car races and giant heaps of twisted sheet metal to offer. It also feeds your ears with something other than the roar of car engines. The guys in Dead Poetic prove it, already inscribed in the music annals with three albums. The latest is called Vices. Quantity doesn’t justify existence if there’s nothing deeper at the core. Talent, say. And singer Brandon Rike, guitarists Zach Miles and Dusty Redmon, bassist John Brehm and drummer Jesse Sprinkle cover that bare minimum just fine. But how’s the originality of what we hear?

Screamo is a music subgenre that, in all the years since its birth, has stirred up the more demanding part of the listening crowd. With a clear vision that you can’t defy the market’s harsh demands unless you squeeze some melodic decoration into your music and cast the spell of commercial digestibility on yourself, Dead Poetic headed into the studio last year too. Behind the production desk sat Aaron Sprinkle, who has so far conjured up the sonic image of bands like Pedro The Lion and Anberlin, while Chino Moreno, guest co-producer and guest vocalist on no fewer than two songs on this record, made sure the balance of classic rock influences sat in harmony with that nineties alternative ring. Chino is a guaranteed crowd-puller, if only because it’s hard to imagine Deftones without him. Still, Dead Poetic sound a lot closer to Stone Temple Pilots and Pearl Jam at hardcore volume than to any cocky, “fresh”-sounding clone of modern alternative. They’ve left the screaming behind and gone for singing that actually has a head and a tail. ‘Cannibal Vs. Cunning’ is first contact with the band’s cosmetically reworked look. They used to smash the glass in your glasses with their vocals, and now they’re capable of melancholic multi-part singing. The track rocks and hypnotizes with a conglomerate of sound that’s a mix of sentimental nineties grit and the artistic minimalism of bands like Deftones, and you can also partly hear the production polish of more commercial bands like, say, early Linkin Park. Riker sings in a tenor register, and the mass-direct hit into your head is rounded out by the full instrumental. After the rocking, it’s time for a dash of old influences, hardcore ones, but sweetened just right with a basic leap into the already-heard combination of Stone Temple Pilots-style rage you admired on this band’s latest releases. ‘Lioness’. Still, despite the fullness of sound, there’s a lingering taste in your mouth that Dead Poetic fell into a linear form of repetition right from the start, hammering their messages into you with steel nails and, at the same time, pleadingly straight into your third eye. The continuation of the parabolic flight adds a meditative line that even A Perfect Circle wouldn’t turn down, and Riker works through the theme of disappointment and the loss of emotional intelligence in true Maynard fashion. All that’s left is self-destruction and death. But the guys offer further consolation. Opiates have been used to numb pain long before now, so the song ‘Narcotic’ with all its decadence doesn’t move you much. It sounds closer to a speed overdose than to tramadol or some other sedative. At least they spared you the withdrawal for another time. Still, minute by minute the feeling gets stronger that you’re going around in circles, listening to something likable but too similar to what you’ve already heard. The tempo stays the same, and in top gear the band runs out of revs to climb one step higher. So they partly hit the brakes and offer a perfectly solid little alternative ballad that could easily be one of the record’s main hits. ‘In Coma’ reminds you of Coheed In Cambria. All so that ‘Long Forgotten’ can air you out, high-octane, in the explosive gale of the next track, which again you’ll swear sounds like Scott Wailand in his new rock-revolver-slinging brainchild. Stale and chewed over, but it still makes you move and nudges your heartbeat a little faster. The nineties “remake” continues, and Dead Poetic, in their two-dimensional perfection, can’t be bothered in the slightest. The first surprise, if I can call it that, is a genetic experiment crossing the Audioslave sound with something supposedly autonomous. ‘Sinless City’ is the record’s second stall in the spinning, and you’re soothed even more by the hypnotic duet of Dead Poetic and the already oft-mentioned Chino Moreno. ‘Paralytic’ sounds sexy and calming. As if the guys were competing for new standard-bearers who could wave the alternative banner of that “the-best-of-Deftones” sound. The hypnotic vibe carries on, and ‘Animals’ gives us the first outlines of classic Led Zep-style shamanism, while post-apocalyptic destruction creeps in as a hallucinogenic apparition in ‘Crashing Down’. And since it’s perfectly clear Moreno wouldn’t be happy with only a side role on the record, he cooked up and served them an electro-beat bowl of something that could just as well have gone onto the soundtrack of the next Team Sleep record. ‘Copy Of A Copy’. Nomen est omen. And to close, they woo you one last time with a post-grunge kiss, trying to shove their numbed tongue, sore from copying what’s already been said, at least as far as your tonsils. ‘Vices’ is the swan song of a record that could have been a success, if only the time machine programming hadn’t gone wrong.

Dead Poetic are undoubtedly poetic and listenable, even likable, but they completely lack the element of pleasant surprise, of doing anything new. They’ve dutifully consumed and digested, and in their own artful way crapped it all out into a lovely little pile that would no doubt deserve its five minutes of fame and at least a tenth of your attention, if you were somehow to give it to them. They’d have had a lot more success than today some ten years ago, when they could have fought STP, Jam and the rest of the grungers who “blossomed” after the death of Nirvana’s frontman for the top spot on the MTV chart. As it is, Dead Poetic are just one more band that can play, has melody, talent and vision, but whose sell-by date has already slightly expired.