Source: Album artwork
Versus have been born into a very harsh musical climate. They only formed in 2015 and this, The Cardinal, is their debut album and comes only a year after their debut EP. It would be a real shame if that was it for this band, and it probably won’t be, but sadly the kind of music that Versus are making has a very limited shelf life, and over here in the UK we have already started to drift away from it.
We should probably start with the good point about this album. Unfortunately, they are slightly slim pickings; at best you could say that the band clearly have some idea of what kind of music they want to be making. All of the songs on The Cardinal are very coherent, sometimes to the point that the grooves and riffs (which are entertaining enough) seem to pop up again at other times in the album. Theres a few songs, ‘Burn‘ and ‘No Safety‘ in particular, which wouldn’t sound out of place at 3 in the afternoon at Slam Dunk festival.
The production on the album can certainly be said to lend itself to this kind of music. It’s no surprise it was done by Casey Bates who has produced such luminaries as Memphis May Fire, Chiodos and Pierce The Veil. The thick nature of the instruments, rhythm section in particular, adds a very necessary weight to the otherwise pretty basic grooves and riffs that form the core of this album.
Which brings us on to the main point about this album. There’s nothing offensively wrong with The Cardinal. Aside from the occasional moment where the vocal tones, both clean and unclean vocals, grate against the weight behind them in a horribly obvious manner, there isn’t anything that makes this album stand out. These days there is so much great music being produced, but there’s also a lot of slurry being made that is simply trying to ape off of the good stuff. There is nothing new, interesting, progressive or different about The Cardinal, and that is more annoying than actually being straight-up bad.
Everything from the lyrics, to the riffs, to the backing keyboards, to the song structures themselves, has been done to death an infinite amount of times before. There isn’t anything necessarily wrong about not being the most original band ever, but if you’re going to do cleanly produced nu metal/metalcore then for heaven’s sake try and write something a bit better than anything Memphis May Fire have done over five albums.
