It’s kind of wild that bands like this still exist with a platform in 2024. You’d be inundated with them throughout the 2000s and 2010s, but like the equivalent of hardy little mammals sticking it out through the devastating mass extinction, South Of Salem remain standing. Not through much considerable effort on their part, mind. Their 2020 debut The Sinner Takes It All spoke to that—bang-average hard rock, with said averageness emboldened by how low-hanging the ‘dark’, ‘edgy’ persona is. Basically, it’s what you’d expect from a band with song titles like No Plague Like Home or Demons Are Forever in the big year of 2020. And it’s not agile or witty in an Ice Nine Kills sort of way; more on the level of Escape The Fate or Black Veil Brides, where they’re practically dangling their own limitations square in your face.
Speaking of Ice Nine Kills, though, they’re clearly on the radar if the song Static is anything to go by—a view on the ephemerality of life coaxed through an over-egged movie metaphor, essentially pulling a far better, more creative band’s gimmick from underneath them. (Sure, Ice Nine Kills don’t own that, but…come on! Just listen to the thing!) That’s about the level we’re at with South Of Salem, and that’s the upper limit, too. Most of the time, it’s not even as clever as that, instead taking the form of hard rock that believes the sleaze and attitude it’s pushing is actually what comes through to the listener. And it’s just not. At all.
To put it simply, this might not be the death of the party, but South Of Salem are still very, very late to it. It’s what you get when your ideation of a band like Black Veil Brides is so pronounced that you aren’t even being discreet when you name one of your songs Stitch The Wound. And at least at their best, Black Veil Brides could sell a suite of larger-than-life rockstar personas, without having to default to lazy clichés that often verge on embarrassing. It’s certainly a plus that they’ve stopped giving their songs horrible pun titles, but the emphasis on being dark and twisted and tortured just has no legs beneath it. More often than not, songs like Jet Black Eyes and Hellbound Heart read more as the mood boards from which the finished things would be drafted; that’s how little of an individual spin South Of Salem put on them. And then with Villain as the closer—a song in which frontman Joey Draper compares himself to various superheroes before the evils of society turn him away from that—it all putters to a halt.
At the same time, it’d be wrong to suggest that Death Of The Party has no entertainment value whatsoever, if only for how clearly, sincerely committed South Of Salem are to all of this. The dreams of both Sunset Strip icons and countercultural juggernauts are not hard to see, and if you squint at it (or just pay attention to the solos they’ll rip out), you can kind of see them getting there. On paper, anyway, because there’s a need to go over the top that South Of Salem just don’t have. Try as they might, they’re severely low on exhilaration when it’s played this straight, forgoing the sole factor that, alone, is what makes similar examples in the 21st Century feel alive. It’s all played adequately and at a very even keen throughout, with none of the pyrotechnic flair or gaudiness that’s a must-have. Even in the vein of something darker that South Of Salem are trying to court, they don’t go far enough in a gothic or Halloween-camp direction as they ultimately should, instead landing on stock-standard hard rock with a few strokes of black paint and makeup for good measure. So yeah, just like Black Veil Brides, then.
The worst part of it is how inconsequential all of this feels. It’d be something if Death Of The Party was a horrendous, disastrous miss, but as mid-to-below-average listen for the most part, there’s nothing interesting to be gleaned from that. Even its absolute worst features aren’t even exclusive to itself. Draper’s singing-through-a-blocked-nose style is really no different that what Craig Mabbitt has been doing all his career, nor do the lyrics rise above the general awful / cringe waterline that a lot of similar acts have popularised. Admittedly, they get close—“Your lips are so juicy / You’re like Cupid with an Uzi,” declares Bad Habits (Die Hard), seemingly unaware that you’re allowed a second draft when songwriting—but when the big wham-o line on opener Vultures is as trifling as “You didn’t want me at my worst / So you can’t have me at my best”, a tone and roundabout level is definitely set.
All of that is to say that Death Of The Party is by no stretch the worst thing ever, but there are few more damning examples of every shortcoming that South Of Salem have than it. They aren’t particularly electrifying in a trad-rock sense, nor do they bring the fire and thunder that modern iterations of glam-metal are required to have. More often, they’re just sat in the middle, waiting to maybe attach onto some passing attention and call it an achievement. And hey, they might—there will be an audience for something like this; it’s why these bands stuck around for as long as they did. But maybe the fact that a lot of them have diminished so much should be a wake-up call, or at least something for South Of Salem to ponder.
For fans of: Black Veil Brides, Escape The Fate, Avenged Sevenfold
‘Death Of The Party’ by South Of Salem is released on 19th January on Spider Party Records.
Words by Luke Nuttall
