Album Review: Pierce the Veil – Misadventures
2 min read
One is unlikely to find a more ambitious or consistent post-hardcore band than Pierce the Veil. Misadventures is their follow up to their 2012 success-story, Collide with the Sky, and like that album, it continues to expand the horizons of their sound, incorporating elements of pop-rock.
Lead single The Divine Zero opens with a few seconds of soul keyboard before breaking into the band’s more typical crunchy sound. It betrays the ambition of the album, as nearly every track here is structured dynamically, switching styles and sounds constantly, rarely maintaining a drum beat for more than 16 bars. The Divine Zero in particularly feels very manic, but it has an infectious energy that makes its frequent switch-ups palatable. The biggest flaw of the track is the lyrics, which are certainly vivid in their depiction of suicidality and drug abuse, but too often fall into spelling out emotions in place of imagery – “I’m not meant for this world, I don’t see the point”.
Circles is something of a change of pace for the band, sounding almost like a post-punk, or pop-rock track. Supposedly written from the perspective of a victim of the Paris Terror Attacks, the track feels in somewhat questionable taste, as it refashions the events almost like an action film – “another bullet and we both started running”. In spite of the flawed concept, instrumentally, the track is excellent, with churning guitars investing a sense of drama into the proceedings.
Closing track Song for Isabelle is another tale of depression (although about the eponymous “Isabelle”), but is delivered with more tenderness than the other tracks. Towards the end of the track, vocalist Vic Fuentes quotes the 1994 Ahmad Lewis song Back In the Day – “some days I sit and wish I was a kid again”. It’s shamelessly sentimental, but after the grimness and solemnity of the rest of the album, it feels like a ray of light.
Misadventures certainly feels ambitious, and Pierce the Veil cover a lot of sonic and thematic ground, but it’s hard not to feel like the record rushes over things, rarely giving one idea enough time to properly develop. Fuentes has his moments as a lyricist, but sometimes he becomes overwhelmingly morose, leading to an at-times-challenging listen. Nonetheless, Pierce the Veil remain at the top of their game in terms of moving post-hardcore music forward.
