Dear Love: A Beautiful Discord — The Devil Wears Prada

Dear Love: A Beautiful Discord is the first full-length album by The Devil Wears Prada, the metalcore band from Dayton, Ohio. Rise Records released it on August 22, 2006. It runs eleven songs in just under 40 minutes, and every lyric on it was written by singer Mike Hranica. It's rough, crowded and sometimes plain silly, but it's also the sound of a young band that wasn't shy about what it believed.

The story

The band had already put out a demo called Patterns of a Horizon in 2005. Stewart Mason at AllMusic explained that Dear Love is essentially a re-recording of that demo with two new songs added, "Dogs Can Grow Beards All Over" and "Texas Is South." He called them "two excellent new songs," and said the album has "better sound and tighter arrangements" than the demo, which makes the earlier record "necessary only for completists."

Then there's the name. Joey Molinaro, writing a reader review for Jesus Freak Hideout, admitted his first question was why a band would take its name from "a chick flick." The movie had come out just before the album, and plenty of critics couldn't resist the joke. The reviewer at ReadJunk called it "the worst name in the history of music," then spent the rest of the review admitting the band was good anyway.

What it's about

Molinaro got to the heart of it when he said the lyrics are "very poetic with their words, yet, show their faith boldly and unashamedly." He pointed to a line in "Dogs Can Grow Beards All Over," where Hranica cries out, "Dear Lord, deliver me from this hypocrisy." He also noted that the band said it wasn't just a group of Christians playing music, but "an actual Christian band."

The song titles don't tell you any of that. "Swords, Dragons & Diet Coke" and "Who Speaks Spanish, Colon Quesadilla" sound like jokes, and they are. But the words underneath them are serious. An AllMusic user review quoted "Rosemary Had an Accident," which says, "Jesus is the beautiful structure of love." That reviewer thought the gap between the goofy titles and the heavy lyrics was ridiculous. Others found it charming. Either way, it's the album's personality in a nutshell.

Two short instrumentals, "Redemption" and "Salvation," help hold the album together. They're brief, moody pieces with keys and piano, and they give you a breather from the noise around them. "Salvation" closes the album, and the Jesus Freak Hideout track list credits guest vocals on it to Cole Wallace of the band Gwen Stacy.

The sound

The album opens with "The Ascent," which Molinaro described as an almost silent instrumental about a minute long. He turned it up to hear it and was "suddenly blasted with the thundering guitars" of "Gauntlet of Solitude." Consider yourself warned before you press play.

From there it's fast riffs, slow heavy breakdowns, screaming and growling, with clean singing breaking through. Mason said the band was "fairly wide-ranging in its influences." He heard keyboards that sound like they came out of "European symphonic metal" and "emo-tinged clean vocals" from guitarist Jeremy DePoyster. What surprised him most was "a sense of playfulness that's largely missing from both CCM and metal."

ReadJunk liked the "good musicianship and vocal range, proggy versatility, and original breakdowns," and said the band used "gothy keys and piano in interesting ways that are only sometimes corny or overdramatically silly." One Sputnikmusic reader review went further, saying, "This is not your average metalcore. This is something new." It singled out "Dogs Can Grow Beards All Over," with its catchy opening riff, the screaming that comes in a few seconds later, and the clean line "He wears a slick jacket and gold watch" before the final breakdown.

What the critics said

Not everyone was won over. Another Sputnikmusic reader review summed the album up as "what happens when too much is attempted." It complained that the bass is barely there and that the keyboards often feel forced, adding, "By trying too hard to be unique, The Devil Wears Prada winds up being nothing other than generic." It also noted that the breakdown at the end of "Rosemary Had an Accident" goes on for around two minutes.

Punktastic was harsher still. Its reviewer heard "a Cradle of Filth esque growl" and riffs borrowed from other metal and hardcore bands, and called the album "nothing short of generic throughout." ReadJunk's bottom line was a backhanded compliment: "Proggy, interesting metalcore that's unfortunately religious and sometimes silly."

What's interesting is that even the doubters agreed on one thing. That same harsh Sputnikmusic review called "Dogs Can Grow Beards All Over" "the one song on the album that actually shows true creativity and potential," and said its ending, where the keys and guitars lock together, is "how the band should sound." Mason, who liked the record, had already named it one of the two best songs.

Mason opened his review with a line that still holds up. He wrote that "as dubious as the concept of Christian metal might sound to the unconvinced (and/or the unsaved), it's not necessarily an intrinsically bad idea." This album is a good example of why.

The bottom line

Dear Love: A Beautiful Discord isn't the band's best record. The songs wander, the production is thin, and the jokes in the titles wear out before the album does. The band would tighten everything up a year later on Plagues, and go heavier still on With Roots Above and Branches Below.

But this is where it started, and it has something those later albums don't always have, which is a sense of fun sitting right next to a plain cry for God. Molinaro was right when he wrote, "It's not for everyone, but for those Christians who like a little bit heavier stuff, this is the record for you!" Start with "Dogs Can Grow Beards All Over," then play "Swords, Dragons & Diet Coke" and "And the Sentence Trails Off," and you'll hear the band they were about to become. For more on the band, see our The Devil Wears Prada page.

7/10

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