Well folks, it’s been a good run. This is without a doubt the longest I have gone without landing myself an awful corset-core album. I cherry-picked from the promo bin a little more, I got lucky with a few random rolls. But the dice always turn against you sometime, as any D&D player will attest. I knew I was in trouble when I saw the genre and the worst band name since Significant Point. Then I saw the cover and my fears were confirmed because LOOK AT IT! Gaze upon this absolute debacle and weep for laughter. No amount of Photoshop skill could have saved the ludicrous self-serious poses the band assumed here, and indeed, no amount of Photoshop skill was applied. Meanwhile, the promo text confidently declared Uninverse1 a masterpiece of emotional connection to the human experience. My expectations were below the floorboards before the first note started, so can Secret Rule prove me wrong?
Initially, I did not think so. The electronic beat that kicks off “Disorder” and the hushed repeated ‘you’re eeeeevil, you’re eeeeevil’ reactivated my funny bone within seconds. As is tradition in corset-core, the music comes second to the vocals, which in this case belong to one Angela Di Vincenzo. To be fair, her technique is not terrible. She has good power, and in the lower registers, her timbre has a Doro Pesch-like quality. She doesn’t hit all the notes, which is worrying on a studio recording, but I’ve certainly heard worse. However, her performance is stuffed with squealy pop affectations, presumably intended to emulate emotional engagement. With a voice that already tends towards the shrill in the higher registers, the squeaks make for an uncomfortable listening experience as I find myself wincing every other sentence. Combined with equally overused and forced vibrato and unfortunate amounts of ESL,2 the vocals overflow with pop excess that only becomes more off-putting the longer Uninverse plays.
But looking past the vocals and peeking under the hood, the songwriting is often surprisingly able. The focus is on the choruses, as expected, and across the album, those contain some strong vocal lines, which even Di Vincenzo’s over-singing can’t hide. Furthermore, beside the choruses, actual riffs dot the album, such as on “Time Zero” and “Gravity on Us.” The quality drum performance eschews the tedium of the standard snare-kick 4-count, adding fills and frills for a more dynamic style that brings actual variations in energy. Though the bass gets buried more often than not, a few passages allow it to shine. If it weren’t for most of the surface bullshit, a few excisions could have made this a passing power metal album.
But like a half-decent cake covered with a mountain of fondant, the surface bullshit ruins everything underneath. The vocals are only one symptom of this affliction. Several tracks give a leading role to the keyboard, and the keyboard is fucking garbage, an icepick assault to both eardrums even in short bursts. It is the leading cause of death of “Disorder”3 and has me afeared every time I see “I Am” or “From Null to Life” coming up in the tracklist. Between the keys, the pop-focus of the vocals, the clumps of electronic beats, and the flat, vocal-centered production all point to a band trying too hard to sound ‘modern’ and aging itself back to the cringiest leftovers of the 00’s.
I know you and I love a good takedown now and then. Hell, it was practically My Thing for a while here at AMG. Based on the cover art and the first track, Secret Rule seemed ripe for the plucking. But I couldn’t fully commit to the bash-fest here, because unpleasant though Uninverse might be, there is a modicum of talent hidden in the background that spills out through the cracks, which makes the end result more a tragedy than a comedy. Were this a younger band, I might express hope for their improvement in the future. But this is Secret Rule’s 8th proper album4 in 9 years. Hope is dead and the keyboards killed it. At least the band photos are a laugh.
Rating: 1.5/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 256 kbps mp3
Label: Lucky Bob
Websites: secretrule.bandcamp.com | secretrule.it | facebook.com/secretruleband
Releases Worldwide: November 24th, 2023
