Motionless In White – Decades

Decades is a victory lap for the band, their album that allows five guys from Scranton who once slept in the rest stop while snowstorming in their van to tell you, in detail, that they didn’t die. Congratulations. Really. Not everyone lives through their own van.

The band starts with the title track and already in less than a minute manages to convince you that Chris Motionless is very much alive. Again, sure. But so is herpes. Nobody writes songs about herpes and makes those songs chart. The entire song is a kind of revival speech – turning fears into weapons, no funeral, no tombstone, surviving the decades – and it works quite effectively because Chris Motionless sounds like a man who seriously considered death and then decided against it just for spite. Spite, it seems, is an infinite energy source that powers the whole album.

Next thing is ‘Log In / Crash Out,’ a track dedicated to doomscrolling on the internet. Handheld gods and digital legacies and Satan living in your downloads – all of that would sound hilarious if it came from some teenager writing in a Tumblr blog in 2013, but now it’s being screamed by a middle-aged metalcore band with an entire symphony orchestra of distorted guitars backing them up. There is something poetic about such dedication to hating on Instagram. It’s not really an insight. It’s just very expensive rage directed at a screen.

Which brings us to ‘Playing God,’ featuring Corey Taylor – a track dedicated to the toxicity of the internet and its ability to turn people’s private lives into some sort of spectacle. The hypocrisy here is not only evident, but it’s load-bearing. Corey Taylor sounds like a man gone berserk on this track. So, he found something to be angry about, or perhaps it’s the only slot left in his contract where he must fulfill a rage quota. In any case – good job, very committed to the message that we hate the internet. Until your merch table proves that we don’t.

And then comes whiplash – ‘R.I.P.,’ featuring Skylar Grey – a duet about wanting your lover to be buried right beside you so neither of you has to face eternity alone. It may be the most romantic thing on the record, or it could just serve as a restraining order to be issued to the singer. Honestly, I’m not sure what the band was thinking while creating this track. It’s stunningly gorgeous and incredibly creepy – like a wedding vow written by someone who just finished watching Twilight for the fourth time in a week.

Speaking of – ‘Blood Rave’and ‘Love at First Bite’ are two tracks coming after each other as if the tracklist went to a clearance sale of Hot Topic’s inventory. We’ve got fangs, moonlight curses, “sink my teeth into her mystery divine,” all of the Gothic essentials. It’s Twilight fanfiction with a breakdown. I don’t mean it as an insult – someone in the band apparently still believes in vampires as an emotional framework, and there is a certain purity to such dedication. You respect the kind of purity Corey from Flat Earth Society possesses. Completely wrong, yet impressively unbothered by the proof.

‘Fight Like Hell’ is when the record suddenly remembers that it should be a metalcore album about violence and not a supernatural romance novel. All boasts of being someone’s worst nightmare and making sure your audience fills the seats – all the wrestling promo stuff. Wrestling promo usually sounds absolutely insufferable from anyone else, but here it just sounds like Tuesday.

‘Count Back From Zero’ and ‘Blood Pact’ continue in the same vein of crowns, kings, and blood oaths, apparently required in every single metalcore album – every metalcore band apparently is contractually obligated to overthrow an ancient monarch that never existed. Whatever. Keep it. Nobody needs it.

‘All That I’ve Ever Known’ is the only moment when the album stops with all the cosplay and actually gets personal – addiction, overdose, the tragedy of being someone’s last hope. And it is the strongest thing on the record because it leaves the vampire costumes aside and says something true. Just having said something honest, the record instantly put the vampire costumes back on for the next track, probably feeling embarrassed of its own honesty and trying to mask it with even more blood metaphors.

‘Afraid of the Dark’ is the emotional center of the album – it’s based on the real story of how the band’s van broke down in the snowstorm twenty years ago and forced them to cancel their first tour. It’s an honest, anthemic track and the only track on the record that seems to talk about something honestly instead of reciting affirmations through a Hot Topic window. Fair enough – twenty years of struggling through snowstorms gives you one sincere song, and they used it very well.

Then comes ‘Sunglasses at Night’ and it feels like it somehow found its way from another, much more campy band’s rehearsal room. It’s the only truly fun track on the album because at least it is talking about something more lowkey than vampires, doomscrolling, monarchy, apocalypse or addiction.

‘Hollywood, ‘the bonus track that tells us about the fame eating itself alive and everyone being someone’s victim – it all forms the theme of Decades. This band spent twenty years surviving through pure spite and determination, and they want to tell you about it in every possible dark font they can afford. Vampires, death, internet monsters, monarchy, addiction, more vampires – it’s Halloween turned into a five-record-long business plan, and business, twenty years later, is still good.

None of it is bad. That’s almost the most annoying part. It is competent, occasionally very moving, often ridiculous and exhausting in the particular way of being trapped at a party by a man who is trying to tell you about his twenty year survival story in six different costumes.

Motionless In White are a band that has survived a snowstorm by the side of I-81 and gave themselves an album about vampires, doomscrolling, and one very good track about addiction between all the fangs.

TRACKLISTING:

01. Decades
02. log_in//crash_out
03. R. I.P. (ft. Skylar Grey)
04. Fight Like Hell Preview
05. Playing God (ft. Corey Taylor)
06. All That I’ve Ever Known
07. Blood Rave (ft. Anthony Martinez)
08. Love At First Bite
09. Count Back From Zero
10. Blood Pact
11. Afraid Of The Dark
12. Sunglasses At Night
13. Hollywood (Bonus Track)
14. Fight Like Hell (ft. Outlier) (Bonus Track).