Darker White - Fever 333
2019's STRENGTH IN NUMB333RS was one of my favourite albums in a year of favourite albums. I was a massive fan of letlive. but had been left a little disappointed by final album If I'm The Devil..., and although the Pressure Cracks EP captured a lot about what I loved about Letlive. it didn't (and still doesn't) seem like a full length was on the way.
Enter Fever 333. Made An America had set my brain on fire, and when STRENGTH dropped I fell in love with it immediately. There was an urgency to it that had been missing from later Letlive., a barely-contained fury at the state of the world that had me (and everyone else) calling Fever a modern successor to Rage Against The Machine.
It's been a frustrating five years since then to be a Fever fan. Post-STRENGTH singles have been hit and miss, and the departure of Stephen Harrison and Aric Improta in 2022 really made it seem like the writing was on the wall for the band. It felt like Letlive. all over again.
With all that in my mind, and knowing I haven't loved the singles from this new album (aside from $WING, which feels like it could have come off STRENGTH IN NUMB333RS), I went into Darker White with muted expectations. Following a record like STRENGTH was always going to be difficult even without a five year stretch that has torn the band apart.
I would love to be able to say that I was wrong, and that Darker White immediately grabbed me and beat me around the back of the head in the same way that STRENGTH did, but it didn't. It's certainly not a bad album, but the highs are never quite as high as STRENGTH and the lows are much lower. It has the feeling of a band trying to recapture the magic and missing, and that's a shame.
Weirdly I think it's the singles that mark the weakest parts of the album. They're the moments where it feels like the band is trying the hardest to sound like pre-new-lineup Fever, and it doesn't quite work. The urgency and polemic feel artificial, whereas tracks like DO OR DIE and DOA feel like they mean it and sound like a natural evolution of the band's style. The back end of the album after DO OR DIE (minus single DESERT RAP, which doesn't do anything for me) feels much stronger than the first half for me, and it feels cohesive in a way that the front end isn't. DO OR DIE / NEGLIGENCE / DOA / PIN DROP / MOB MUSIC PART 2 plus earlier track TOURIST - on which Jason (or someone else?) - does an uncannily good Kendrick impression - would be an incredible 6 track EP, and it makes me happy to hear that the band definitely still have it in them, even if this release is a little more inconsistent than STRENGTH.
Given that Jason has cancelled the upcoming tour due to mental health concerns, and that this album has come barely 18 months after half the band quit, it's probably not surprising that this isn't quite the masterpiece that STRENGTH was, or that it feels like a first record in places despite how long the project has been active. This really is the archetypical difficult second album. Despite that, though, it's still mostly solid and occasionally great, and I'm cautiously optimistic about the future of the band.
Let them know.