Release Date: October 23, 2011
With the group’s latest release It Culls You (self-released) being only its second full-length and first addition to its anthology since 2009, you wouldn’t expect The Envy Corps to have such a turbulent biography—especially with an Iowan upbringing. Confrontation is out-of-character for a bunch of Midwesterners. But since 2004, three members have dropped out of the group and since been replaced (one replacement being guitarist Brandon Darner, former frontman of To My Surprise, Slipknot founder Shawn Crahan’s side project), they have opened for The Killers during a U.S. tour, and, while in London, Darner suffered a stroke onstage. All of this while still achieving modest fame throughout the world.
The band describes its new album as fundamentally different than previous releases in that it leaves behind the pop-music immediacy that drove many of the band’s past songs and instead allows the tracks time to develop more organically, which is most evident in “Fools (How I Survived You and Even Laughed)” and “Give It (All) Up.” In fact, the pang of high-pitched synthesizer and irregular beat in “Give It (All) Up” challenges the listener to even endure through it until a temporary reprieve in the form of a climactic guitar riff drowns out all other sounds, washing away the tension.
Yet even without the changes, The Envy Corps has still coated this album in the sounds of the last two decades: dabbing its sonic paintbrush into the genres of the 1990s and 2000s, covering its painter’s palette to color its musical canvas. In the end, the picture resembles a Nu-wave-y adaptation of early-’90s anthemic UK shoegaze. Or, in other words, it resembles the dozens of paintings that have come before it. Distinction is lost on Envy Corps. It’s new and yet, it’s all been heard before. Augmenting this problem is that, since Dwell (2008), it seems Luke Pettipoole has shamelessly—boastfully even—lifted his vocals, both their cadence and sound, from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke.
All of this makes for a forgettable album.
The album lacks uniqueness.
Every track on It Culls You could have easily been lost among the clutter on the radio in the mid-’90s to early ’00s. The album isn’t bad; it’s just easily ignorable. The group is clearly competent, so its inability to distinguish itself is all the more frustrating. The members seem to be limiting themselves.
They’ve mastered every sound they’ve tried to emulate. Now it’s time they head into the darkness for themselves to see what they can flesh out.
The Envy Corps – It Culls You tracklist:
- “Make It Stop”
- “Ms. Hospital Corners”
- “Give It (All) Up”
- “Command+Q”
- “Palace on Stilts”
- “In the Summer”
- “Dipsomania”
- “Everyone’s Trying to Find You”
- “Med. Song”
- “Exchequer”
- “Fools (How I Survived You And Even Laughed)”
- “Fools, Pt. II (Bow)”
