Corpus Christi - The Darker Shade of White

By Andrew Wieler - Grade A Explosives - 10/08/2009

I'm sure at one point or another, everyone reading this has been swayed by an alluring sticker on the front of an album. It may be something simple like a highlight of the singles, or a description of what the band sounds like. In truth, I'm all for these stickers when they tell me what the band sounds like, because if I'm going to throw hard earned money at something, I want to know what I'm going to be getting. So, when I was at CJLO and saw a sticker on the front of Corpus Christi's album, The Darker Shades of White, proclaiming that the album was "for fans of Killswitch Engage, As I lay Dying and Atreyu," I got a bit excited. Granted two out of three of those bands have considerably slipped in the quality of their music, but I figured, "Eh, why not?" , and thusly took the album home.

As I was popping it into my computer, set to write a review, I decided to look at the names of the tracks I'd be listening to, so I turned the CD over, and I saw something that made me very nervous. The album was released on Victory Records, which I affectionately call "One Trick Pony Records".  

I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but Victory Records has done a slow, downward slide from meaningful and progressive label to a sad shell of its former self, releasing three archetypes of albums. First, we have the generic hardcore, featuring such bands as Arise and Ruin, Emmure, and about one hundred other bands. Second, there's the "My Chemical Romance/Taking Back Sunday/emo-ish" bands encapsulated by Aiden, Hawthorne Heights, Bayside, Silverstein, Funeral for a Friend, and so on. Finally, there's Between the Buried and Me albums, which, let's face it, are in a class all their own and as (pardon the pun) progressive as Victory can muster. This is a bit simplistic, but sadly, not too far off.

So, you may ask, "where, if in any of these categories does this Corpus Christi album fall?" The answer is an old category which Victory knows all to well. While my back was turned, Victory seems to have added a fourth type of genre to their roster, and that genre is... (drum roll) "melodic hardcore", which really is only a skip away from the hardcore they'd been releasing as of late, and harkens back to when they were putting out albums from the likes of Atreyu, Nodes of Ranvier, and Refused. Now there’s a whole new group of these melodic hardcore gents on Victory’s active roster.

For what its worth, the band refer to themselves as a “Christian metal” band. But, unlike a band like Still Remains, they don’t make intensely overt references to their religion in their lyrics. In fact, their lyrics are rather dark with lines such as, “Humanity only breeds death, yet we continue to believe in each other“, and “The urge for escape, the taste of cold steel on my lips, the rope around my neck”. As we all know, nothing says Christian values like suicide and a deep seated hatred for all mankind.  

But what about the music on The Darker Shades of White? Where does the Cincinnati natives’ album play into all of this? Well, it hits all the right mixes of heavy, fast riff-age, the correct amount of double bass, and even provides ample amounts of clean, melodic and growling hardcore vocals. For all of these reasons, the album is pretty good. It is, as the sticker stated, comparable to Killswitch Engage, or As I Lay Dying. But, this album is almost too formulaic suffering from a copy/paste form of music writing which is all too common among all bands landing in the general “hardcore” bin.

Basically what it boils down to is if you really like melodic hardcore, specifically melodic hardcore that doesn’t really deviate much from other bands in the genre, then this Corpus Christi album is for you. Likewise, if you just have a passing interest in it, you’ll probably get one or two spins out of the album, but after that you’ll probably lose interest in it. And thus… “One Trick Pony Records” strikes again.