Album monstrously bleak

Flowing out of your speakers like poison from the mouth of an asp, Motionless In White’s debut album, Creatures, presents itself as brash blasts of mechanical metal broken up by rockingly beautiful melodic sections, with enough noise collages to make anyone’s inner-scene-kid jump up and down with glee. Creatures

Motionless In White

Fearless Records

Rocks like: Alexisonfire, Warped Tour

Grade: C+

Flowing out of your speakers like poison from the mouth of an asp, Motionless In White’s debut album, Creatures, presents itself as brash blasts of mechanical metal broken up by rockingly beautiful melodic sections, with enough noise collages to make anyone’s inner-scene-kid jump up and down with glee.

The standard elements of screamo are present — riffing guitars, screamed/sung vocals, a double-kick bass drum — but there’s also a surprisingly deft keyboard player who, to put it frankly, plays funky little grooves underneath a giant mass of noise. This addition might seem random, but for someone who doesn’t identify with the genre, it goes a long way in countering the vaguely repetitive musical ideas that dot portions of the album.

Lyrically, this is some bleak stuff, but it seems characteristic of screamo’s general reliance on over-the-top gory imagery to sensationalize each song. As far as the vocals, I can’t say if they accomplish anything more than another sound texture trying to fill a giant void of space. Toward the album’s end there’s some experimentation with dynamics that breaks up the monotony, but this seems an exception to the rule.

Creatures’ production is cohesive for what it is: an album that seems made for a Warped Tour stage. Anyone who wouldn’t want to be there, though, might want to stay away from this album.