Falling in Reverse - Popular Monster Review
Falling in Reverse’s fifth full-length album is nothing short of a car-crash, using anti-cancel culture rhetoric to display hideous opinions over painful instrumentation. Any music lover should be offended.
I know what you are thinking. Can there really be no redeeming qualities in this album? Can it really get a zero? Yes, it can.
Falling in Reverse are a 2008 American rock band that followed on from Escape the Fate, who abandoned Ronnie Radke after his manslaughter sentence was officialised – Ronnie Radke, now 40 years old, being the poster-boy for online meltdowns, bullying, spirals of addiction and arrests, and a prolific, vitriolic hate for music critics. In 2011 and 2013, this wildly egotistical swagger made for semi-decent scene albums that tickled an expanse of genres – check out ‘bad girls club’ for a fun, if misogynistic, Mario-Kart-esque hyper-pop-emo anthem quirky enough to be cool. At the time, the furiously sexist lyrics were part-in-parcel of the image, nationalised by Kerrang! and therefore accepted by all with a shrug. 2015’s ‘Just Like You’ opens with ‘I am aware that I am an asshole / I really don’t care about all of that though’. Oh how we should have stopped them then.
The problem with this album is that 2024 sees no place for Ronnie Radke and the odoriferous tail-wagging past he insists on dragging into this record. Ronnie is constantly battling with himself and the rest of the world, and in these two conjoined arenas manages to betray both enemies. Two of the songs lash at the cultural zeitgeist the industry’s ‘cancelling’ has created; In ‘ZOMBIFIED’, Ronnie chants ‘they're cancelling, cancelling you/and they won't stop 'til everybody's zombified’.
Hypocritically, Radke goes on to show this stunted behaviour by referencing himself as ‘boy’, at once calling for critics and haters to take responsibility whilst diminishing his own. For somebody charged for manslaughter almost two decades ago, this is a hilarious take. The narcissistically titled ‘Ronald’ includes a transphobic lyric, whilst the album sees features from an abuser, a neo-Nazi, and a transphobe.
Ronnie’s lyricism couldn’t possibly remind us any more times of how much of a victim he is. At a recent live show, the band also projected Tik-Tok videos from ‘haters’ and encouraged the audience to mock them. Later, a projected ‘asshole cam’ focused mainly on Ronnie. How fitting that the target came from himself.
Ronald Barthes might butt in here with a plea to separate the art from the artist, a fate that has favoured bands like The Smiths and the Lostprophets. Well, sure, give it a listen. Packed into an hour we have delirious hardcore style instrumentals that cut into gruffled rap tracks and back again. We have orchestral instrumentals that embellish bizarre auto-tune voices from a wide cast of characters – including Ronnie’s girlfriend – so the record gives the feel of a fuck-around day in the studio. The vocal embellishments on ‘Watch the World Burn’ are harsh and, even considering the ubiquitous over-production, painfully out-of-tune.
Interrogating mental health within this schticky metal-core genre might seem impossible, but it’s been done recently, and better: check out Bring Me The Horizon’s latest LP ‘POST HUMAN: NeX GEn’ and compare the lazy structure of Falling in Reverse’s songs, one of which parcels off a generic YouTube beat as its own. The closing song is a ‘re-imagining’ of Papa Roach’s ‘Last Resort’, with a painful orchestral suite downloaded straight from the American equivalent of garage band.
To reiterate – nothing here is redeeming, and the fact that the band throw ‘postmodern’ over these genre felonies is an insult to the philosophy and to their own artistry. It is baffling and decently depressing that a band like Falling in Reverse still have a platform, and a big one at that. The scene appears to love them. Falling in Reverse have almost 8 million monthly listeners on Spotify. The sink is at your door; let it in.