Missio Loner: New(er) Album of The Week

New(er) Album Of The Week is posted every Friday

    So my first introduction to Missio was their terrible hit Middle Fingers, a pompous and boring track about being a self important hipster. Essentially the message of the song, without a hint of self awareness or irony is that he’s a cool outsider because his taste in everything is whatever the mainstream is not. Literally the only way he qualifies his tastes is that it’s not what other people like. This message is transmitted via a song that sounds almost exactly like the typical minimalistic electronic track that is popular right now. Given my disdain for this track, I wasn’t expecting much from their full album, and I was not disappointed.

    I’ll admit the first two tracks caught my attention for a brief moment, with Animal actually not being too bad. The second track lost me when it’s fairly up tempo intro faded into another slow and plodding track the moment the vocals came in. This is kind of like the modern equivalent of Darkwave, being the dark and dreary alternative to the type of minimalist electronic music played on pop stations. I Do What I Want isn’t terrible, with some cool synth effects and a pretty good vocal delivery on the verses, but it get’s boring fast.

    As Middle Fingers comes around I realize that the reason this album sounds so boring is because, aside from being simple and empty sounding, every song sounds painfully similar. The vocal and drum production is so identical on every track that they all kind of flow into each other, which is not helped by the lead singer's devotion to sounding as half asleep as possible.

    Bottom Of The Deep Blue Sea is probably my favorite track, just because the use of the piano and dark atmosphere work for the lyrics of this track. Plus the title is actually a pretty interesting lyric, and the underwater sounding synths harmonizing and playing around the vocals is actually pretty cool. It’s still a chilled out and mildly boring track, but it’s the kind of spacey and chilled out music I can get behind. The same cannot be said of the next track Kamikazee.

    With a name like Kamikazee I would expect something energetic or bombastic, or at least interesting. Nope, this is a boring brag rap song done by a half asleep indie singer. How the hell a song called Kamikazee has a refrain about money, power and champagne is beyond me. But this track at least makes more sense that KDV.

    KDV, which stands for Killing Darth Vader is just a weird song. The hook of “Killing Darth Vader with my M****er F***ing Kick Drum” was apparently inspired by someone uttering that phrase after knocking over a Vader bobble head when hitting the kick drum. After each utterance we also get a distorted sample of The Imperial March, which I guess is supposed to add to the joke. The issue is if that is supposed to be a funny lyrics why doesn’t anything about it sound like a joke? The lyric is delivered like this deadly serious line that’s supposed to somehow tie to the existential crisis of the rest of the song. Maybe these guys are so hipster that their irony is actually not ironic, making it even more ironic; isn’t that ironic, don’t ya think? But this fails as a joke song for the same reason most of their songs fail as regular songs, it’s too boring!

    Twisted is a knock off Weeknd song, and not a very good one and the closer DWI is the same boring as the rest of this album. Everybody Gets High and I Don’t Give A… are actually not bad, with Everybody Gets High being a dark mix of Dubstep and Trap that work pretty well and actually sounds interesting. I Don’t Give A… is similar but features guest rapper Zeale who actually gives a Missio song a pulse for the first and only time on this album.

    I can’t say I hate this album, it’s hard to muster up those strong emotions for something this boring, but I definitely don’t like it. It’s a boring and dull electronic album that is dark for the sake of sounding dark without any reasoning or justification for it. With few exceptions the songs are dull and plodding with the sheen of hypocritical Indie arrogance plastered all over this thing. Plus they abused Darth Vader and this is inexcusable.

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