This Devastated Fan bring out the big guns early on, going all out on the air-punching anthem with ‘Shoulder the War’. A niggling guitar and heartfelt vocals in the verses give way to a huge harmony-laced chorus that could fill a stadium twice over and yeah, we’re in emo rock land.
It’s not all terrible, and in fact, it’s not nearly as bad as all that to be fair. ‘Contingency Plan’ packs some grungy guitars into a soaring chorus, and there’s a nice swerving guitar line on Bambi Woods’, but at times it’s all too earnest, anguished and heart-on-sleeve. ‘An Assembly of Witches’ (isn’t the correct collective noun for witches a coven?) makes a fair stab at being epic, but is just too overwrought. The response such clenched-fists angst elicits isn’t so much ‘wow, that’s powerful and moving, I feel the pain’, as ‘get over it ya sap.’ The serious, tortured artist sincerity of the obligatory mid-album acoustic number, ‘Hostage’ is just too obvious, even if it does rock out at the end, and by ‘Carnivore’ the quiet start bursting into a big rock anthem has become predictable.
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It doesn’t help that the vocals are a bit clean, TDF are big on melody and harmony: nothing wrong with that in itself, but it does rather take the edge off, and ultimately, for all the plot, there’s a real absence of any kind of debauchery here.
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