Without actually looking at any stats, I'm willing to bet with a pretty major degree of certainty that this is my most listened-to album of the last month, hell maybe even over the course of the entire year. I've been listening to Dynazty's third album (actually their sixth but to my knowledge they've pretty much retconned everything prior to Renatus out of existence), Firesign, on a nearly constant loop for an embarassingly long time now. I've been passing up other assuredly great releases that have the potential to completely blow me away because I keep coming back to this. The reason this is notable is because I'm not actually listening to it because I love it so much. No, I can't kill this album because for the fucking life of me I can't decide whether I love or hate it, because I'm pretty sure I feel both with equal intensity.
See, Dynazty's last album, Titanic Mass, was exactly as the title indicated. It was a huge album, with skyscraper sized hooks being thrown at you from all directions. It was a shallow and basic album but these Swedes were just really god damned good at focusing all of their energy into these gargantuan anthems with rousing choruses, incredible vocals, and surprisingly meaty riffage. The whole thing took on this form of a dumb arena metal band if all of the members were sentient guitars made of pure Kobe beef. I loved it, I still love it, I spin it just as much now as I did two years ago, "Untamer of Your Soul" is one of the most finely-tuned expressions of pure triumphant uplifting glory I've heard in years. That song is what plays during my training montage before the big karate tournament. FILL YOUR HEEEEART WITH GASOLIIIINE!
And now here's Firesign, and it really sounds like three different bands, none of whom put out the previous two goliaths of modern melodic metal. And that's not exactly a bad thing either. Evolution is inevitable and encouraged as far as I'm concerned as long as a band continually plays to their strengths, and there's no denying that this album focuses on great hooks just as much as the previous two, so I don't hate it on principle. The problem is that this feels... lazy? Safe? I'm not sure, and even then I don't really think that at all. This is a fucking confusing album for me.
Let's get the positives out of the way first, because there are a lot of them. Nils still sounds like an impeccable Adonis belting out completely banging vocal hooks every single time he opens his gorgeous mouth. Listen to something like "Ascension" or especially the title track. It's like he's on top of Mount Olympus and we're all in the palm of his hand, and he's belting his heart out with a powerful tenor about how we're all amazing people who can accomplish great things. I'm completely in love with this man, and he's still the highlight here. There's also a heightened keyboard presence here, which is welcome enough considering some of the negatives I'll get to later. They give the songs a lot of forward momentum and carry many of them on their own (outside of Nils, obviously), which is different, but neat. Really the main positive is just how strong a good amount of the hooks are. "In the Arms of the Devil" sounds like some lost Hellfire Club era Edguy track, and the title track is seriously phenomenal. The chorus on that one is such an incessant ohrwurm that it's almost insulting. It's dumb but holy hell does it stick, and I can't adequately express how much I adore the corny "whoa-oh" part that shows up for half a second in the background. It's little details like that that turn this stupid thing into something special. The band is barely power metal anymore, but on tracks like "Firesign" they prove that it doesn't really matter. They don't need to be playing fast, they just need to be playing loud, and dammit they'll leave their mark.
The problem is that when they stripped away the hard hitting power metal from their sound, they sorta... forgot to replace it with something else. There are a few noticeable filler tracks here ("Closing Doors", "My Darkest Hour", "Let Me Dream Forever"), which wasn't really a problem on their previous albums, but here even the good songs feel somewhat unfinished. There is barely a riff to be found here, honestly. Those lightspeed palm mutes that were an obvious signature on Renatus and Titanic Mass are almost nowhere nowhere to be found here (there are some slowed down versions of what I'm talking about on "Starfall"), instead the guitarist finds himself playing exclusively dumbass chugs and sustained power chords for the entire duration. One cool Running Wild style triplet melody on "Ascension" can't cover up how empty "The Grey" is in the riffing department. And I mean, maybe I shouldn't be too hard on them for this, because they obviously weren't going for riffs on this one. There are some new hints of darkness on "Follow Me" which helps it stand out, but overall this is a very light, sugary album with absolutely no teeth whatsoever. I can't really let "The Grey" go,-
Okay, I have to admit something here. I don't plot out my reviews before I start writing, I just whip everything out as a first draft, and it was at exactly that point up there that I decided to go double check the Metal Archives page for the band to learn the guitarist's name (It's Mike, by the way), since I was gonna point out how fucking bored he must be during that song. And what do I see on their artist page? Nils Molin is active in one other band. What band?
Amaranthe.
That is exactly who I was going to compare them to. The line in my head was something like "Mike must be so bored with this song, 'The Grey' sounds like something post-Tarja Nightwish ghost wrote for Amaranthe". And then I fucking learn that the vocalist is actually in Amaranthe now. Suddenly every negative thing I was going to say about Firesign makes complete fucking sense. The complete lack of riffs, the focus on vocals and keys at the expense of the now-unimportant rhythm section, the hooks being great but everything around them being so wholly unexciting, the few songs outside of the four or five that I really like sounding like they were written in a day, everything perfectly mirrors Amaranthe. I was gonna call this "corsetcore with a dude" and it turns out that's exactly what it is. There is absolutely no way that influence from them hasn't snuck in. Whether it was a deliberate attempt to become a bit more palatable or just happenstance by the virtue of creative osmosis, it's there, and it's completely impossible to brush from my mind now that I know it for a fact. The overt pop influence isn't necessarily a band thing in itself, and it's precisely why I like the title track so much, but it's so much more prominent now because the band decided to focus entirely on one strength when really they had a bunch of others as well, so a lot of cool elements were dropped. Titanic Mass powers forward, Firesign bounces around. And while the bounciness totally works for the title track or "Follow Me", it makes dull crap like "The Grey" just annoying. God dammit god dammit all.
Well I guess that sorta shortens the rest of this review doesn't it? There we have it, listen to corsetcore like that band Annette formed after leaving Nightwish or any random band Nuclear Blast pumps out with zero concern for quality simply because big tits in a corset are guaranteed Youtube views, that's exactly what half of this album sounds like. There are great songs here, no doubt, I can't get enough of the title track, "Ascension", "In the Arms of the Devil", and "Follow Me", but the rest of it is either filler or just plain stupid. That's why I'm so torn. Do I want to recommend an album that I openly don't like half of because there are some great songs? Do I want to tell you to pass because the good songs are great but the rest of the album is forgettable nonsense? I still don't know! This is a frustrating album for exactly that reason. I feel kind of duped by the Amaranthe-isms being so prevalent immediately after the singer joined that band, but I kind of like the new direction when they hit the mark. I don't know, I'd leave the rating blank or just rate the good and bad parts of the album differently if I could... so I will!
RATING: 84% when it's good, 39% when it's lame
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