Music Review: La Dispute-Panorama: After Five Years of Silence
Panorama is the latest album by post-hardcore group La Dispute. La Dispute is a band from Michigan that even though it is mostly post-hardcore, also has influences of emo, post-rock and even spoken word when it comes to the vocals. This was a band that I’ve heard some songs from before but never could get into them. The vocals were not my cup of tea at all, and I had a hard time looking past that even if I found the music in the background to be entertaining. Still, I was surprised to hear about this band again because it had been a long time since I listened to any of their music or heard their name. So I was interested to see what this album could offer ever since the last time I heard their music and maybe now that I have more of an open mind with music, I’ll enjoy what these guys put out. Which I have to say I did.
This album is pretty nice when it comes to the instrumentation on it. It’s not as aggressive as the past songs that I had heard from this group, but the slower post-rock sound on this album is performed very well and is pretty consistent throughout. It’s not necessarily like this is some utmost unusual instrumentation that should be praised as being so, but it gets the job done.
The one thing that I was worried about when I was listening to this album is how I would react to the vocals. Like I said earlier, I was not a big fan of Jordan Dreyer’s vocals nor his spoken word style. However, my opinion on this spoken word style has changed ever since I heard the latest Daughter’s record where the vocalist mostly did that. So now I’m more open to this style and believed that it wouldn’t be a problem on this album. The spoken word vocal style just as usual is on this album, and I think it works out for the most part. There are times on this album though where his vocals once again don’t sound like they fit with the music in my opinion. The vocals that you would hear on most post-hardcore records are prevalent on this album, but I think Jordan’s vocals are, in my opinion, off-kilter. The song “RHODONITE AND GRIEF” is one example of this where his voice just doesn’t fit with the song. “VIEW FROM OUR BEDROOM WINDOW” and “FULTON STREET II” are two other songs that have this problem in my opinion and really what this creates for me is an awkward sounding listening experience. Other than that though I do like how his voice sounds when he isn’t trying to go too hard on a song. Although you may find that the vocals may end up drifting off into the background which I think hurts this album a little. Lyrically I find this album to be solid actually. The lyrics do have the same themes of most emo songs, but I think that in this case, the words are much smarter sounding. Everything sounds very mature when it comes to the lyrics on this album, and I appreciate that.
Overall, this album is pretty decent, I wouldn’t say it’s one of the best albums I’ve heard in a while, but I do like how they put together post-hardcore elements and the more ambient parts post-rock together to create a pretty nice sound. Some of the vocals though, in my opinion, bring this album down from where it could be.
7/10
