The Order of the Silver Compass has allegedly been in the works for well over a decade, which is impressive considering it sounds like it was written in a week. The information around the internet about the band that I've been able to scrape together hypes Athanasia up as a power trio consisting of "Members of Five Finger Death Punch, Sebastian Bach, and Joey Jordison's Murderdolls", which is so fucking hilariously misleading that it might as well be straight up false advertising. Not only is that not appealing considering all three of those groups suck, but it feels like they're going out of their way to tie big names to a band that has precisely none of them. Joey Jordison and Sebastian Bach aren't anywhere near Athanasia, they're just thrown in because the drummer has played for both Murderdolls and Bach's terrible solo band (and Wednesday 13, who has a sizeable fanbase but Blabbermouth readers don't like 'em so they get swept under the rug). The guitarist/vocalist/main man here is the one who brings FFDP into the picture, which is a terrible, terrible band of bootlicking hacks who exclusively write Nickelback songs with double bass sometimes, but Caleb Bingham here was only in the band for a few months when they first started out, and was out of the band before they even released their first album. Since then he had a few stints in Zonaria but never actually managed to appear on an album, and he played in Ascension, a shitty band that nobody liked, and from there is where he pulled the third member of Athanasia, the no-name bassist who only ever played in Ascension previously.
So we're starting off with the wewest of lads here, a power trio of nobodies doing their best to cull as much undeserved clout as possible by playing Six Degrees of Corey Taylor with their respective careers. This wouldn't really matter all that much if the music was great and transcended their crappy pedigree of popular-but-bad bands in their past, but The Order of the Silver Compass doesn't really do that. It's better than the sum of its parts, that's true, but not by much, and not enough to be worth recommending.
Musically, what Athanasia puts forward is melodeath that tries to straddle the line between the more aggressive origins of the style with the more alternative stylings of the most popular bands in the style, but they lose their balance pretty quickly and land pretty cleanly on the side of the equation that's much more on the side of post-Soundtrack to Your Escape era In Flames than something like Slaughter of the Soul. There are occasionally djenty tones in the low chugs behind the clean choruses as well, but they're not as pronounced as you may think. The end result is something that sounds like a cross between Soilwork and 90s-era Megadeth, clearly focusing entirely on listenable hooks as opposed to pummeling aggression. That's fine in theory, not everybody has to take the same approach to metal, but this comes off as very safe as a result. There are a handful of chuggy breakdowns backed by harsh vocals, and the title track actually deigns to pick up the pace during the verses, but for the most part this is very easy-on-the-ears radio metal that would fit quite snugly between Breaking Benjamin and Disturbed on alternative radio stations across Chicago.
Disturbed is actually a great point of comparison, because I was pretty much stunned at how much the vocalist here channels David Draiman when his hits his upper register. Compare "The silver cooompaaaass will seeeet you freeee-heeee" with "Ten thoooousand fists in the aaaaaii-HAAAIR". I haven't listened to any Disturbed song since like 2005 or whatever but I can pretty safely remember that most of what Athanasia does on Order of the Silver Compass sounds like a slightly heavier Believe or Ten Thousand Fists, which in itself isn't all that dissimilar to what Five Finger Death Punch peddles when you think about it. That's what the vast majority of the album sounds like. It's that style of heavy rock that flirts with metal quite liberally and even crosses over here and there, but really it appeals much more to listeners that don't want to listen to anything too extreme because then they'll complain about not understanding the vocals. On one hand I can readily admit that this kind of music just isn't for me, but on the other hand I can also recognize that despite being a project that Caleb has been trying to release for over a decade, there really isn't much here that sounds like it's been refined or looked over all that much during those years. About the one and only thing I can unequivocally say is great with no caveat is the soloing, which is really where my Megadeth comparison comes from. Most of these leads are great, going more for a soaring epic mood than actual shredding, but that approach works really well with this more mellow and digestible form of metal. It's more Youthanasia than Rust in Peace in that regard, but it works because the riffs and general song structure err towards that mid 90s era as well. But by that same token, that's also the only area where FFDP isn't a fucking joke as well. Granted these guys handle it much more efficiently than the idiotic "everybody step back and shine a spotlight on the guitarist" approach that FFDP takes and every one of these good solos sounds pretty much the same, but I'll concede that they're good regardless.
So the shadow of Five Finger Death Punch is pretty hard to shake here, and while I'll give the band some accolades for not being the cringey authoritarian-worshipping nimrods that FFDP are, Athanasia still finds themselves fighting many of the same criticisms. The songs are uninteresting and unexciting, they're all very safe and radio friendly, the vocals are fine in terms of control but lack any real power, the riffs get heavy from time to time but are usually noticeably lacking in punch, et cetera et cetera. I can dig poppy radio metal from time to time, it's well known how much I love Battle Beast and Powerwolf, but Athanasia doesn't do it for me at all. The only moments that stand out are the title track for having a solid enough chorus and "White Horse" for being the token ballady song with an epic solo, but overall this leaves me very cold. It might work for Q101 listeners since it sticks to a proven successful formula to the letter, but for me and the types of people who read this blog? Hell nah, you don't want this.
RATING: 34%
PS: There's really nowhere to put this but holy shit I hate that album cover. Just try to dissect it for a minute, what the fuck is going on there? It's a total mess of layers and layers and layers of random symbols that all amount to nothing. Fuck that overbusy techno-Pollock crap.
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