I do want to start off by saying sorry about last week; I was kinda busy and really not feeling too great (insomnia and stuff), but I’m back now and to make sure that there’ll be a huge amount of stuff up this week, I’m going to name this week ‘Eighteen Visions Week’, so expect a good amount of stuff up this week.
So the track I’m covering this week is one of Eighteen’s most known tracks and went on to become somewhat of a game changer for them in pretty every sense; “Motionless And White”.
This track in so many ways was the song that made Eighteen Visions stand-out musically as much as they stood-out appearance-wise. By the time of this release Eighteen had already pumped out 4 releases (2 full albums and 2 EPs), with their previous effort being ‘Until The Ink Runs Out’ which helped coin the term “fashioncore” to describe their appearance. At this time you have to remember that the world of hardcore was still full of massively baggy sports shirts and cargo’s, and the whole metalcore scene was just getting started and finding its feet, so for Eighteen to be prancing around with their multi-coloured bright hair and wearing suits and scarfs, it was clearly frowned upon by loyalists.
To stand-out musically they began to incorporate a sting of melody into their music, even adding in clean vocals. This approach was used a bit on ‘Until The Ink...’ but wasn’t fully embraced until this record and most notably, “Motionless And White”.
The song starts off instantly with James Hart’s trademark hardcore yells accompanied by co-founding member Ken Floyd’s intense drumming; so far it seems as though this is the usual 18V, just what you’d expect from this band of young genre-bending rockers.
Then the listener gets to the first breakdown of sorts and is greeted by soothing melody-driven vocals blasted out by this monster Hart, not only are these clean but they almost sound like a cry for help; James is IN this moment of the song and is singing straight from the soul. The song continues with this trend, blending both hard, coarse vocals with clean tune-driven one’s, even jumping from one to another in quick succession during chorus-like parts of the track. To be honest, I think I’d even say that even James’ most anger-filled scream on this song is done so with heart behind it, softer and more delicate. This isn’t a negative, it shows the continual growth that James has always strived to accomplish (check out my interview with him from a few months ago), no longer is he screaming his lungs out about death and Satan and the death to our King, but rather he is speaking to us and yelling when needed to get the point across.
This emotion is after all understandable, hell it would be anyway no matter what the subject matter of the song, but this one isn’t any song, no “Motionless…” tackles a subject that many people have probably faced, the problem of drug addiction and choosing between drugs and those that love you. To add to the emotion, the entire band was at the time (and always were) a straightedge band, meaning all of the members chose to not take drugs, drink alcohol or smoke, so to write a song about this obviously had to mean something to them depending on why they had made their choices.
Now a straightedge anthem in this era of hardcore wasn’t uncommon, heck it seemed every hardcore band in the scene during this time had a host of them, what makes “Motionless…” different is that it does something that none really seemed to do, and that was to try and reason as opposed to saying “fuck you, you drink and I don’t so you’re a cunt” kind of thing. The lyrics are powerful; they speak of reaching out, telling this person that this is their final chance, after this they will be consumed by the addiction.
The entire song seems to be one almighty question that is projected in the last two lines of lyric; “could you come back down, would you come back down”.
Though bringing in different features and techniques, the track does incorporate something that was used a lot by Eighteen (not to mention most hardcore bands), and that was unpredictability in a song; the tempo and sound change drastically and regularly through-out. These rapid changes are a testament to how tight the band were instrumentally at the time. This was the first record that included brand new bassist Mick “MickDeth” Morris, who had replaced former long-time bassist Javier Van Huss, so there had to be some pressure on the young metaller. Now I think it’s known that I was a big fan of Mick and I don’t mean to be biased or say anything bad about Javier, his playing was incredible and old 18V have some of my favourite 18V songs ever, but man did Mick make sense; his playing was right for this new take Eighteen were going for, his look fitted the new fashioncore path, everything about Mick screamed what 18V would become. Along with James, Ken Floyd on drums and Mick, Brandan Schieppati and Keith Barney rocked it on guitars and really help make this song sound new yet keeping this sense of old about it too.
Frankly I feel this song is one of Eighteen Visions best tracks, it stayed true to what had come before in the sense of heaviness and metal influence, yet brought in so much more which helped it sound fresh and started them off on this path that would lead to them becoming the band they did. It’s almost impossible to say how much this song (and the band, but this will be addressed in a future write-up on Eighteen Visions as a whole, so stay tuned) influenced today’s music. Seriously, without this track, this album and subsequent album ‘Vanity’, heavy music today would be VERY different, if this song had come out in the last few years, 18V would have been MASSIVE, no one can doubt that (look at the damn band Motionless In White, where did they get their name?...).
Sadly though, what happened happened, Eighteen split in early 2007 and sadly earlier this year Mick Morris died so there is no chance of ever getting to hear the original line-up that created this song blast it one more time. All that can be done is to celebrate this song, celebrate the band and pass the word that Eighteen Visions did in fact exist and that without them, rock music would not be what it is today. FACT.
"Motionless And White" is available at the link below, where you can buy the track from the album 'The Best Of Eighteen Visions' via iTunes, but its also available for pretty much any site the sells anything these days.
If anyone is interested in taking the reigns for next week or any week, hit me up on the Facebook page.
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