Review Summary: Trend hopping at its worst.
It’s more tedious than anything naming how Wildways went wrong with
Into The Wild. There’s watered down post hardcore a la anything Cameron Mizell has produced (coincidentally, this happens to be one of them), an overreliance on predictable song structures and clean sung choruses, and a painful amalgams of Issues’ and Attila’s trademark sounds, complete with pumping party electronics and rapping. It’s more than just being poorly crafted music, every second of
Into The Wild feels like a blatant bandwagoning onto everything that’s been popular in commercial metalcore and post hardcore for the last few years. Frankly, there’s so little here that resembles the Wildways that used to operate under the admittedly awful name Sarah Where Is My Tea. While the name change was a positive, the stylistic one is nothing short of ill advised.
Into The Wild is simply tedious to listen to, sapped of energy and passion, and all the more disappointing from the knowledge that this little band used to have genuine potential.
Say what you will about Wildways’ old moniker, but their output, specifically
Love & Honor was really quite good. After shifting away from a passable deathcore sound at their inception (in retrospect, perhaps a sign of things to come that they’ve already been jumping around stylistically) Wildways veered sharply towards a more melodic sound on their next outing.
Love & Honor remained very much metalcore in sound, but with fringe influences from melodic hardcore and creative incorporation of piano. It wasn’t commercial, but it seemed honest. And now it seems like Wildways is just the opposite.
Songs like “Skins” and “What You Feel” are packed full of tacked on electronics to cover the uninventive rhythms, all in an effort to seemingly just get through the song until the chorus can carry them through. Even the choruses don’t really impress since frontman Toli Wild has a merely passable range and an inadequate ear for hooks. “Sirens” isn’t a bad track, ironically being one of the most upbeat and polished picks here, but at least it has a real hook. However, it’s brought low again by the head scratching choice to layer Toli’s rapping over a guitar solo in the back half. As sterile as most of the standard fare here is the worst offender is early single “Faka Faka Yeah”. It’s not a throwaway track, it’s the song you delete from your iTunes library so you can listen to the rest of the album more comfortably (not that the album in question is one you’d want to listen to again). “Faka Faka Yeah” is an awkward mish mash of Issues style electronics and warped vocals with Attila’s “middle fingers up” party attitude that just drags the album down even further.
It’s easier to reel off the record’s problems than its positives. Case in point, the only real bright spot here is “Sirens” and it’s far from perfect. Wildways essentially toss every bit of their potential on
Love & Honor out the window to get a slick, overdone production job from Cameron Mizell and to bandwagon contemporary post hardcore/metalcore trends. It’ll take the Wildways name further than their previous sound would’ve, there’s no doubt about that, but there’s no payoff for the listeners looking for something more.
