Bear with me, I need to compare something to Final Fantasy again. I know, I know, it's kinda my thing. Blame the fact that Vivi was the closest thing I had to a real friend growing up.
Once upon a time, Final Fantasy became the videogame institution that it became because the series used to pump out excellence at an alarming rate. Over the years, Squeenix has completely lost the ability to tell a great story (once their greatest strength). The games were and still are absolutely fucking gorgeous, with every release pushing the hardware of its home console to the limit, with slick presentation and heartbreakingly beautiful cinematics. But the actual heart, the stories they tell, the white hot burning core of the entire role playing genre, has been utter fucking trash for decades, and despite how different they all are they somehow manage to have similar problems. Very often, the stories devolve into incoherent multiverse nonsense (also very prevalent in Kingdom Hearts, because some Brain Genius decided Tetsuya Nomura's only skill of drawing tiny torsos and a fuckload of belts would somehow translate to a creative role and for some utterly unfathomable fucking reason they keep letting him direct shit) with annoying characters and nearly identical villains. There are elements that succeed here and there by what I can only assume is divine flukery, but the overall trajectory has been safely rehashing the same ideas that barely worked the first time for years now.
That's what modern Testament is to me. There is absolutely no denying that their presentation is on point. Ever since their resurgence on Nuclear Blast with The Formation of Damnation in 2008, each album has been graced with a stunning piece of Eliran Kantor artwork, the production on every album has had instantly recognizable combo of sheen and punch that Andy Sneap always delivers, Chuck Billy's gruff, howling holler remains one of the most iconic voices in thrash metal, I maintain that to this day they are still worth catching live because their energy is unreal at their currently advanced age, and the lineup is basically the stuff of dreams nowadays since Alex Skolnick returned and the rhythm section has been stocked with the twin Jeff Garcias of the metal world in Steve DiGiorgio and Gene Hoglan (the two best journeymen support players in the whole damn macrogenre).
And yet, when the fuck is the last time Testament wrote a truly phenomenal song? When is the last time they delivered a riff that truly blew your socks off? When is the last time they crafted something as instantly catchy as "Souls of Black" or "Over the Wall"? Hell I actually like The Formation of Damnation but there's no denying that nothing on there holds a candle to what they pumped out on The New Order. Every single album in the Nuclear Blast era has had unbelievably slick presentation but no matter what new thing they try, they completely fail to deliver on the most important component, genuinely great riffs and songs. Titans of Creation only follows this pattern, with another breathtaking Kantor piece, another pristine Sneap knobjob, another great Billy performance, and another way-too-long album with precisely zero great riffs. Who the fuck heard "Symptoms" or "The Healers" and decided they absolutely needed to be included?
The soul-deflating hour long runtime is an unsurprising problem, since albums dragging on for too long is a common complaint of mine, but it really hurts here because so little of interest happens despite the consistently high tempo. Hoglan's drumming seems to have lost all creativity, never once showing off his famous speed or lightning fast fills, instead falling into a comfortable metronomic performance that could have been (and probably was) recorded in his sleep, and DiGiorgio's famous fretless bass wizardry is a completely misused waste of talent on par with Jeff Loomis joining Arch Enemy. Peterson and Skolnick's guitar mastery is relegated to stock thrash riffs pulled out of a dusty trunk and their once phenomenal leadwork sounds like nothing but meaningless noise. Testament's classic era was never as extreme as their contemporaries but they still stood out on the strength of excellent songwriting and a knack for maddeningly good hooks, but they seemed to have lost this ability somewhere around six or seven songs into 2008. The only truly catchy song this time around is "Dream Deceiver", and the intensity is at least worthwhile on "Night of the Witch" and "Curse of Osiris", but those are three minor successes on an otherwise uninteresting album at the tail end of a career that has been unimpressive for years now.
I know it's kind of a meaningless critique to just call something uninteresting since it's hard to put mediocrity into words, but that's really the main problem here. Titans of Creation is less than the sum of its parts by a pretty wide margin. The few moments when Peterson gets to inject his love of the more extreme fringes of metal are pretty solid ("Curse of Osiris" is far and away the best track on the album for this exact reason), but meandering riff salads like "WWIII", "Code of Hammurabi", and "City of Angels" make up the lion's share of the album and I can't recommend listening to it in good faith. Like, it's cool that the band's vocals have diversified so much in recent years (Peterson's more extreme snarl is showcased well in "Night of the Witch") but they don't amount to anything meaningful when surrounded by more pedestrian riffs than a musical crosswalk. This is a step up from the insulting lameness of Brotherhood of the Snake but not by much. Titans of Creation is another safe and mediocre entry into Testament's late-career resurgence, and just like the hamfisted comparison from the intro, even the new ideas are wrong in the same way as the old ideas and the actual heart of the band has been diminished to a shriveled lump of barely-beating nothing.
There's really no place to put this, but I have to give a round of applause to "Catacombs" for being so clearly intended as an instrumental intro track but somehow winding up lost in the caboose as the last song on the album.
RATING: 40%
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