I Prevail’s “Bow Down”: You Better Recognize!
Man, this new I Prevail song, “Bow Down,” was a real roller coaster ride of emotions for me. See, I’m in an unusually good mood right now (don’t get excited, I’m sure it won’t last), so when the song started playing I was like, “Wow, I feel like I should hate this, but I’m enjoying it! Sure, it’s the same Meshuggah/djent/Sumeriancore/whatevercore we’ve heard eighteen trillion other bands do (it’s not even the first Meshuggah/djent/Sumeriancore/whatevercore song to be titled “Bow Down”), but it’s heavy and it’s fun and now I’m jumping around my office like an idiot, HOO-RAY!”
Then the auto-tuned-to-fuck whine of a chorus kicked in and my jumping ceased abruptly. In my mind, I was all, “Oh, c’mon, I Prevail, you had one job!”*
I was halfway back to my computer to turn the song off when the next verse kicked in. Suddenly I was once more a-rockin’.
And then the chorus came back, as choruses are wont to do, and the second time, for some reason, the auto-tuned clean vocals and whiney melody didn’t bother me so much. And I enjoyed the remainder of the track. Even the part where the dude screams “YOU BETTER RECOGNIZE!” like he was Jackée or something.
As you can imagine, I was feeling confused. So I listened a second time. And y’know what? I had the exact same reaction. The chorus bugged the shit outta me the first time, not so much subsequent times.
Do I know why this happened? Nope, not a clue. But I will say this: don’t turn the song off during the first chorus. It, too, shall pass.
You fuckin’ “Bow Down” below. I Prevail’s new album is called Trauma, and it’s out March 29. You can pre-order it here.
*Speaking of having one job and blowing it: this band has one dude whose entire thing is being the clean vocalist. He is not, as far as I can tell, a cyborg, which means he has no excuse to sound so robotic, which means he is a singer who does not sing. So hopefully he’s pulling his weight in the band in some other way. I dunno, maybe he’s also their accountant or something?
