DevilDriver - Pray for Villains

Let me get this straight so there isn’t any confusion: this is one of the most important albums in my collection. It’s so important that one of the patches on my jacket consists of the Pray for Villains album cover. Ok, but why is this album so important and why has it been so influential to what I listen to? Well first off, I’ve been listening to this album since the year it was released, so it’s not like I’m having an initial overreaction. So after three years of constantly listening to this album (although it’s become less frequent since they released a better album last year that I wrote a review on), I’m finally ready to tell you the utter importance of this album and the impact it’s had on my music taste. But this is an album review, right? I’m supposed to tell you about THE ALBUM, not my personal connection with it!

The first thing that this album has is extreme variety of sound and style. While still managing to keep the memorable catchiness of their signature sound, DevilDriver manages to pack in songs with more driving tempos like Pray for Villains and I’ve Been Sober. As well as that, this album is different from all the other DevilDriver albums because it has the most……damn how do I word it..catchiness with a rock and roll twist? I don’t know how to say it, but the sound I’m trying to put into words can be found in Pure Sincerity, Back with a Vengeance, and Another Night in London.

Probably the thing that bothers most people about DevilDriver is the really rough yelled vocals and how they sound. For me, I can’t see this fitting in ANY other kind of music other than DevilDriver. In any other situation, those vocals wouldn’t sound good at all. But in DevilDriver, those fucking gritty yells do nothing but act as helium to bring the music up to impossible heights. But in my opinion, the vocalist isn’t the most talented and skilled member of the band, it’s the crazy fuck that plays the drums!

Their drummer can play like no other drummer I’ve ever heard before! Sure, there are plenty of drummers that are as skilled and creative as him (some are more), but they’re all skilled and creative in a much different way than him. This guy can play a really super fucking catchy pattern like at the beginning of Pure Sincerity, and PERFECTLY transition into an explosive blast beat that can easily be mistaken for a goddamn stampede! Not only can he do that, but he can do it without messing up the song or making things sound weird. That’s another thing I love about DevilDriver’s music that I forgot to mention before; every single second of every single song can sound good with any kind of drum pattern you can think of that’s still on time with the music. If you ask me, that’s pretty fucking hard to do!

Although all of the members thrive in creativity, the least-skilled (but still amazing) member is unfortunately the bassist. The reason why I don’t consider him to be skilled is because he never goes outside of the root-notes, he rarely plays an epic fill riff, and you can’t really hear him at all. But I know he’s legit because I watched him play his bass two feet in front of MY FACE. But what he does PERFECTLY is give the music a FUCKING HUGE lower-end and be fucking tight as hell with the drummer. If the bassist and the drummer are rock-solid, it’s hard not to sound good.

Oh! I just came up with a word to describe the sound I was trying to earlier: GROOVE! When you listen to the beginning of Pure Sincerity, you hear GROOVE, and they play it fucking PERFECTLY. You hear it even more in Back with a Vengeance. Ok, so obviously I’m giving this album a perfect score, so I guess I should just throw that out there if it wasn’t obvious enough. If you haven’t heard this album yet, check it out because every single second of it is packed with so much energy and GROOVE that it’s easily addictive.