Athanasia - The Order of the Silver Compass

I don't know shit about Trinitarianism vs Arianism

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.

Cil City - Jump Off the Cliff

1! 2! 3! FLOP!

Stumbling across this one was a fun one because I can immediately recognize that I would've hated this with extreme prejudice ten or so years ago.  On principle, simply being a hard rock band instead of a metal one was an inconceivable sin to the dumbass teenage version of myself.  Why play rock when you could just be faster and heavier instead?  Do you not like adventure??  Inject some god damned danger into your veins you cowards!  Fuck outta here with this weak ass 80s wannabe shit and play some fuckin' Slayer.

Hearing this now, inching ever closer to my thirties, I can appreciate something like Cil City for the fun throwback that it is.  Jump Off the Cliff is still sorta foreign to me, but thanks to my wife being a gigantic fan of The Pretty Reckless, I've sorta grown to jive well enough with this more modern brand of female-fronted hard rock.  I only know like, I dunno, two or three Halestorm songs?  But Cil City reminds me of them anyway, they both have a similar Harley-revving, hotel-crashing, whiskey-chugging, switchblade-spinning, devil-may-care attitude to their craft that's just damn fun.

Jump Off the Cliff isn't a perfect album of course.  It falls victim to many of the tropes of hard rock where the more upbeat party-friendly songs are much more entertaining than the more restrained singalong moments.  "Shout It Out", for example, feels like pure filler, which is a huge problem on an album with only eight tracks, while the title track and "She's Rock n' Roll" are much more energetic anthems that get your blood pumping and stick in your head better.  Cil City is, frankly, just not very good at ballads.  "This Road Won't Take Me Home" and "#8" are completely inconsequential and do absolutely nothing for me, while "Freedom" or "Jump Off the Cliff" make me want to kick open the door to a dive bar and fistfight the nearest guy with a beard thicker than my thigh.

This ends up being an album of two halves as a result, with four hard rocking anthems and four waify dullards, and it certainly doesn't help that it almost perfectly flip flops between the two.  It starts with two raucous rock songs, two sedated ballads, and then the B side flip flops perfectly between the two for each track.  So it's no surprise that the title track, "She's Rock n' Roll", "Freedom", and "Changes" are a hundred times better than "Shout It Out", "This Road Won't Take Me Home", "Fears in My Head", and "#8".  It almost feels like a different band with how drastically the level in songwriting dips, really.  Maybe this makes me the dullard who can't appreciate subtlety, but I know what interests me, and it's not acoustic ballads with no hooks.

Maybe the fuckin' Slayer part of me never died, or maybe Cil City is just better at one style over another.  Occam's Razor says the answer is both.


RATING: 60%

Running Wild - Resilient

Just... ugh

Honestly, I can't think of a more blundered finale to an epic saga in the history of storytelling.  I know that's an altered quote from Spoony's review for Ultima IX, but the fact that he isn't a Running Wild fan shows that he doesn't understand true disappointment as far as I'm concerned.  I mean yeah, Ultima IX is a hackneyed rush job that cornholed what roughly ten or eleven previous games had spent building up and was shit out to meet a hard deadline and failed to live up to all the promise the series had built and whatnot, but that's different than what Rolf has done here.  Rolf had a legendary band, with a legacy nearly unmatched in the annals of metal history.  Running Wild's first eight albums are all considered essential listening by most fans of the band and genre, with some people like me even thinking they were damn near untouchable even further than that (I personally think they were great through Victory), and they were starting to stumble with age.  The Brotherhood flipflops between good fun to snore inducing vomit, and the less said about Rogues en Vogue, the better.  But after a few years of silence, Rolf had decided to hang up his ceremonial robes and bow out gracefully.  He gathered his band and performed one last time, with a set list in part chosen by fans, in front of thousands of boozed up and screaming fans at the biggest metal festival in Germany.  It was an emotional departure, and a great swansong for a great band.

And then Peter Jordan happened.

Look, I know this is Rolf's baby, I know everything that's happened since the very first days of Granite Heart in the mid 70s has been at the behest of Rock'n'Rolf, but ever since Peter Jordan showed up, things went from "bad" to "unbearable".  Rolf's obsession is 70s and 80s cock rock has never been a secret, he openly dedicated "Kiss of Death" from The Rivalry to KISS, and there have always been big hard rock songs from as far back as Port Royal, but they were never the focus until near the end, they never became ubiquitous until the last two albums before the initial disbanding.  And I feel like Rolf's favorite yes-man probably had a pretty big hand in convincing him to resurrect the Running Wild name.  Because let's face it, Running Wild, Toxic Taste, and Giant X have all been the same fucking band for the past eight years now.  Rolf doesn't want to do Running Wild anymore, he doesn't want to write another Blazon Stone or Death or Glory, no matter how badly we fans want such a thing.  Clearly, he's into stadium oriented buttrock, because that's what he keeps writing, and that's all he's been writing ever since Jordan started leeching off the man like the world's most heartbreaking parasite.  The thing that sets this apart from Ultima IX is that Shadowmaker and Resilient weren't rushed or compromised, these albums are what the creator really wants to do.  It's clear that Rolf has poured his heart into these tracks, and that makes the fact that they sound so unbelievably lazy and half-baked all the more heartbreaking.

On one hand, it's pretty neat to see Rolf being so productive again, releasing three albums in the span of little over a year and a half (because let's face it, Giant X is just Running Wild and vice versa, with the same shitty members, same shitty production, and same shitty buttrock songs), but clearly the man is running on a renewed fuel, his passion for music definitively reignited.  It's just sad because he isn't writing Running Wild music anymore, and if he'd've just stuck with Giant X, I wouldn't be so profoundly offended by these last handful of albums he's released under the Running Wild name.  I passed on reviewing Shadowmaker when it was new because there really wasn't anything to say about it.  It was an offensive trainwreck of lame buttrock songs with only a couple tunes worth hearing.  "Piece of the Action" was a decent Billy Idol song and "I Am Who I Am" at least sounded like a Running Wild song (albeit a rather uninspired b-side from The Brotherhood), but that's really all there was amidst a mire of bad "Me & the Boys" type songs.  So how does Resilient differ?

Well, it's a lot less overtly arena rock I suppose, but it's still pretty weak.  There's no outright offensive songs like "Me & the Boys", but it's pretty much an entire album full of "Black Shadow"s and "Riding on the Tide"s.  It sounds more like Running Wild than the rest of the Giant X albums he's been releasing lately, but they're not very good Running Wild songs.  It's an album that starts with filler, continues with filler, and nearly ends with filler.  It'd be like if Pile of Skulls opened with "Roaring Thunder", and then had no other songs until "Treasure Island".  Resilient is full of songs that sound like worse versions of better songs, but the songs they're emulating were always among the weakest on any given album.  It's basically an album consisting of "Raging Fire", "Evilution", "Fight the Fire of Hate", "Land of Ice", "Lonewolf", "Man on the Moon", "Unation", and "Into the Fire".  If that list of filler songs meant nothing to you, then I'm afraid we can't be friends.

At the very least, I can give this album some credit for its energy.  It feels like this should have been released first instead of Shadowmaker.  That album didn't sound like a man resurrecting his legendary metal band due to a renewed passion for the music, it sounded more like a tired old codger trying to desperately relive his glory days.  Granted, Resilient still sounds like that, but it just feels more genuine.  Unlike its predecessor, this doesn't start feeling tired and obligatory until the last handful of songs, everything from the opening to "Run Riot" at least sounds like Rolf had a smile on his face while writing and recording the songs.  They're fun and upbeat, if nothing else.  Now, they're not very good, mind you, but they do at least feel like they were written by a man who wanted to write them.  There are a couple highlights, I will admit.  I can't justify why, but I really like "Run Riot", it's probably the most familiar sounding song on the album, in the sense that it wouldn't have been out of place on an album like Victory (fuck you, that album rules, if you can't dig "Tsar", "Timeriders" or especially "The Hussar", then you are dead to me).  It offers a sense of cozy nostalgia, a warmth of familiarity that I gladly welcome.  And "Adventure Highway" isn't bad either, though not entirely striking.

I feel like the reason a song like "Adventure Highway" or "Fireheart" can stand out on this album is because the rest of the running time is so goddamn samey and uninteresting that anything approaching catchy is instantly caught in your mind.  "Down to the Wire" and "Crystal Gold" are 100000% forgettable and completely unnecessary, and it has a lot to do with the very formulaic writing.  Almost every song on the album sits comfortably around the four and a half minute mark, and they're all structured in a nearly identical and conventional pop structuring.  Every single song is verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-solo-chorus-fin.  It never deviates, it's as bad as All That Remains or Kajagoogoo.  That's not to say that Running Wild was always adventurous with their songwriting, but they never felt as paint-by-numbers tedious as they do here, and it really drags down what could logically be a lighthearted and fun hard rock album.  Rolf even does that fucking thing he always does on "Desert Rose" and "Down to the Wire".  You know what thing I'm talking about.  It just sounds like he's going through the motions for most of the album, even if he's having fun with these motions for the first time in nearly a decade.

The production woes of the past are just as present here as they always have been.  It was never completely clear to me until Shadowmaker, but Rolf's voice needs reverb.  In this pristine, controlled environment, his signature snarling croon becomes the sound of a laughably arthritic old man trying to prolapse a hot dog out of himself.  I'm not kidding when I say the final vocal flourish in the title track sounds damn near identical to the sound I make when wrestling with an unusually resilient poop.  The guitar sound is strangely robotic as well, sounding almost industrial with how tinny and hollow it sounds.  It doesn't sound like a guitar as much as it sounds like a really unconvincing MIDI patch, and when you couple that with Angelo Sasso's mechanically dull drum performance, you get a pretty disingenuous sounding record.  Man, now that I think about it, if you don't believe the rumor of his death in 2007, Angelo Sasso is the longest tenured member Running Wild has ever had.  Isn't that just the saddest fucking thing since Old Yeller?

But throughout all this, I've been noticeably ignoring one track in particular, the signature closing epic, "Bloody Island".  Like every fan worth his salt, I recognize the brilliance in a track like "Treasure Island".  The long buildup, the instantly memorable chorus, the extended soloing section in the middle, the legendary hooks and melodies, there's practically nothing wrong with that song, and it's rightfully regarded as one of the band's best songs nearly universally.  They've never quite captured the same lightning in a bottle again, with "Genesis" and "The Ballad of William Kidd" both being great songs, but not quite on the same echelon as the godlike "Treasure Island", and "The Ghost" and "Dracula" (yeah yeah, I like that song too) both being serviceable and not complete embarrassments, with the only epic of theirs actually falling to utter shit being "The War", from the already snakebitten Rogues en Vogue.  So how does "Bloody Island" stack up against such a pedigree?  Fairly well, actually.  It is without a doubt the best song to be found on Resilient, and easily the most "Running Wild-y" song featured here.  It's pretty much a direct carbon copy of "Treasure Island", but it's almost unspeakably welcome on an album as dull and devoid of that legendary flash like this one.  The main melody is straight out of the Blazon Stone era, the chorus is closer to The Brotherhood, but it's one of the good songs from that album at the very least.  This is what the fans wanted to hear, this is what we wanted.  Even if it wasn't quite as good as the late 80s and early 90s, we wanted to hear Rolf put his effort into doing what he does best: epic, classy melodies and strong, barbed hooks.  I know that's exactly why I criticize an album like Death Magnetic, but really, Rolf has clearly defined his strengths in the past, and what he's been doing for the past decade is little more than a self indulgent vanity project.  It's nice to see him doing what he loves, because he has earned it, but a little throwback like this shows that he isn't completely sapped out of his former magic, he just... doesn't want to do it anymore.

In a way, this is actually a more disappointing than Shadowmaker, because while that album was bad and boring, Resilient is bad, but even more boring and yet somehow shows some flashes of Rolf's former magic, something that was conspicuously absent on the previous album.  Resilient is better, don't get me wrong, but at this point it may just be Stockholm Syndrome.  Despite the slight step up in quality, this is still bad, still boring, still bland, and still disappointing.  It's better than Shadowmaker, but do you know what's better than winning a silver medal at the Special Olympics?  Not being retarded.


RATING - 30%

Megadeth - Super Collider

I'll be that guy: MORE LIKE POOPER COLLIDER! LOL!

Usually when I talk about Megadave, I typically talk about how they're Metallica Jr, how bewilderingly overrated Endgame is, how damn close to perfect Rust in Peace is, things of that sort.  I have the same few sticking points that I seem to harp on whenever the band is brought up, it's a definite flaw that I certainly acknowledge.  So what am I going to harp on today?  Why, how clear it is that Dave Mustaine has lost his goddamn mind, of course.

The series of events leading up to this has been nothing short of a surreal, yet hysterically apt look into the mind of Dave Mustaine.  We all know about how strong his political beliefs are and how staunchly libertarian he is, but that's not what makes him crazy.  There are plenty of normally well adjusted people who believe in their political leanings so strongly that they're willing to say crazy shit to make a point.  I mean, I don't doubt that Dave probably believes that Obama harnessed the power of the Weather Machine from Red Alert 2 to stage the recent tornadoes in Oklahoma, but that doesn't necessarily make him a bad guitarist or songwriter.  No no no, shit like "Super Collider" makes him a bad songwriter.  Yeah, the title track here was released about a month or so ago, and everybody who heard it promptly shit their pants in awe of how transcendentally crappy it was.  A riffless mid-90s radio rock song with tired melodies and the worst vocal performance of Dave's entire career?  Oh yeah, you bet your sweet little tushie this is going to be a comical trainwreck!  I couldn't wait simply for the sheer schadenfreude.  And before then, Dave announced that David Draiman, the hilariously wimpy frontman of Disturbed, was going to be featured and also help co-write a couple tracks.  Fans lost their shit over this prospect.  I'll admit Disturbed released two alright modern hard rock albums back with Believe and Ten Thousand Fists, but they're largely uninspiring and Draiman himself is a hilarious wussburger of a human being.  The cover art was incredibly funny to me as well, it's one of the most well known stock photos of the Large Hadron Collider with just an added lens flare and a Megadeth logo slapped on to it.  It's so preposterously lazy, they may as well have just released this instead:

ON THE THIIIIGH ROAD!

The day finally came where the album was made available to those of us who are leeches upon the underbelly of the music business, and well... it's bad, but it's not hilarious like I was hoping.  I made the choice to avoid Thirteen (pHU(|< 7|-|@ $7UP1D L337 $P34|< p0PP'/(0(|<) based on how little I've liked practically anything the band has done since 1994, but from what I've gathered, Super Collider isn't all that different.  It plays like a collection of b-sides from the mid 90s for the most part, with boring hard rock songs and boring kinda-vaguely-thrashy songs that they've been shilling since The System has Failed.  It's more just really boring and uninteresting as opposed to outright offensively bad. I mean, there are some decent things here; I think "Kingmaker" is cool hearkening back to the sound of Countdown to Extinction (which I have now dubbed "speed rock"), and "Built for War" goes along those same lines.  And no matter how bitter I am about Broderick potentially damning Nevermore to jump ship for the sinking S.S. Megadeth, there's no denying that he and Mustaine play off each other extremely well, and the leadwork has been pretty consistently great ever since he joined the fold.  But apart from the leadwork, there isn't really any consistent positive from beginning to end on Super Collider.  It pretty solidly flip flops between bad and boring with a few bright spots here and there.

To get the positives out of the way first, the aforementioned appearance of David Draiman is actually probably the best moment of the album.  Say what you will about his voice or the insane Alex Jonesian lyrics he's forced to sing (the word "Al-CIA-da" is seriously used (ya rly)), but at least he sounds youthful and energetic.  Mustaine's already technically awful singing voice has been long shot, and so he just kind of grumbles and snarls his way through the entire album like a tired old man trying to still sound as vicious as he did when he was a smack addicted young adult.  The music does occasionally ramp up the aggression, but the vocals just have no chance of matching up to the energy and pace when it does pick up.  And as I've previously mentioned, the speed rock numbers like "Kingmaker", pieces of "Don't Turn Your Back" and the end of "Dance in the Rain" are pretty good (especially that last song, the double bass passages and Draiman's exuberant performance are the clear highlight of the album for me), and the more mid paced stuff can sometimes groove along pretty well at times.  The horridly titled "Burn!" is a pretty good example of such, even if the song is utterly forgettable if not for the dumb chorus.

But really, that's really all the album has going for it.  Consistently impressive guitar solos over the top of mostly boring speed rock and intended radio singles with the occasional bright spot and vaguely thrashy moment.  Nobody really expects Megadeth to churn out dozens of classic songs and riffs like they used to, but I don't think we fans are asking too much to ask for a little bit more effort on their part.  The title track is still worth all the hate it received upon release, with it's utterly boring progression, pointless lyrics, and hideous vocals.  We know that Megadeth can pull off this style relatively well, Youthanasia was full of decent songs like this, and I maintain that "Countdown to Extinction" is one of the better kinda-ballads in the band's repertoire, but "Super Collider" here is an exercise in half hearted ideas being shat forth with no passion from their creator.  The song just kind of stumbles around on a really bland vocal melody and a complete dearth of anything resembling a real riff.  Granted, it's clearly not meant to be a riff based song, but when the vocals are so hilariously botched and the melodies so uninteresting, something like an interesting riff in the bridge or something would have been most welcome. 

And... good God this man's lyrics just need to be addressed.  We all know they suck, we all know that his increasingly extreme political views have been seeping into his music for a while now, but they manage to be both funny and confusing on Super Collider.  Take "Beginning of Sorrow" (which, to my dismay, is not actually a Suffocation cover) for example, which at first seems like a pretty straightforward take on the hot-button issue of abortion.  But as the song goes on, the narrative just gets super fucking bizarre.  A quick summation is this: "Teenage girl meets 'Mr. Right', Mr. Right turns out to be a jackwagon and rapes her, she is given the choice to abort, chooses not to, spits out baby in an alleyway, kid grows up in shitty foster homes, grows up twisted and bitter, becomes rapist himself, the end".  So wait, what the fuck am I supposed to glean from that?  Abortion should be legal because... otherwise there'd be more rapists in the world?  Or... is it trying to make a statement about the fucked up state of foster care?  Or... rape... is bad?  I just don't get it.  And then one song I keep mentioning as being one of the better ones, "Dance in the Rain", starts off with a goddamn "God Alone" dissonant banging while Dave rambles some spoken word crap about how da gubbermint has your car bugged and how they're just the worst thing ever and anarchy and antichrist and whatever I'm not The Sex Pistols I'm not very good at this get off my back!  And then we have a personal favorite of mine, "Don't Turn Your Back".  Favorite why?  Because I'm almost sure this is yet another Chris Poland diss track.  Motherfucker you wrote this already twenty five years ago.  I'm not even kidding, the lyrics even directly reference getting his stuff stolen.  Goddammit Dave, stop being such a booger.

Despite being boring on the whole, there are some strange musical choices here as well.  The aforementioned awkward spoken word intro of "Dance in the Rain" is a big one, along with the banjo rendition of the opening of "My Last Words" (srsly) in "The Blackest Crow".  Most impressively though, is "Forget to Remember".  Honestly, this one is actually probably my favorite because it just so perfectly encapsulates the ever dwindling coherence of our glorious leader here.  First off, it seems like a fairly typical farewell song.  Could be a breakup, could be a death, whatever, it's a sad song, that's the point.  That is until we reach the bridge, where (and I'm so happy that what I'm about to describe is a real thing) we get a spoken word section where a groveling Dave Mustaine begs to some woman to just please let him talk to her while she tells him to piss off because she has no idea who he is.  The female voice in this exchange is played by his fifteen year old daughter.  And then there's one last verse about how vaccines are evil shoehorned into the end because why the fuck not?  What is going on in this man's head?  I implore you, make sense of this insanity.  Albums like City or Obscura sound like the musical manifestation of insanity to you?  Well you simply just haven't spent enough time with Super Collider.  Between the not-bad-but-kinda-half-hearted speed rock and the really terrible radio half-ballads, the layers peel away to reveal a man who hasn't been in full control of his brain ever since he learned how to burn the bottom half of a spoon.  And it's odd because he still manages to surround himself with great musicians, and Broderick here is no exception, and he still manages to shine through when given the opportunity.

But clearly, this is very much a "Dave" project, and the band really has been ever since day one.  This used to work out fine when other guitarists were able to inject their style into the still great songs Dave was writing.  But now that he's an old, decrepit, lip-flapping lunatic, somebody needs to pull the reins and sit the man down, shake him violently and just yell in his face "NOBODY WANTS THREE RADIO ROCK SONGS ABOUT THE BARACKALYPSE.  Goddammit man, we get it, you don't trust the government and personal freedom is being eradicated yak yak yak.  Lots of people agree with you, but you are fucking awful at making this point eloquently.  You're not a very good lyricist, you just kind of hamfist stupid scaremongering buzzwords into an awkward cadence and then run with it without editing your work at all.  Nobody wants this shit.  You know what they do want?  Fast, violent, ripping music with lyrics that have fuck all to do with your increasingly pushy political views.  Look back at 'This Day We Fight', that song was so goddamn good that most people seem to forget that the rest of Endgame sucks.  Just... do that again.  We know you can do it, you just did it flawlessly nary two albums ago.  Why instead do you churn out crap like 'Off the Edge' and 'Forget to Remember'?  Take your pills, man.  Pick up the pace, let Shawn double bass and let Chris shred even more, maybe even give him an opportunity to start writing some riffs.  The pieces are in place, but we have a raving madman at the helm who can't focus or make a good decision anymore.  Get your head in the game, dammit."

That's all there really is to say about Super Collider.  It's boring more than it is outright bad, but even with that being true, it still manages to make some bafflingly strange decisions.  Is it worth checking out?  Ehh, not really.  "Kingmaker" is okay and the second half of "Dance in the Rain" is really good, but otherwise it's one of those things you shouldn't go out of your way for.  Not the trainwreck we were all expecting (un)fortunately, but it's still boring and yet another pointless addition to the ever growing pile of pointless Megadeth albums since Youthanasia.  The band's biggest problem is pretty solidly the band's own leader, and it's sad to say (especially since Rust in Peace is one of my all time favorites), but it's best to just ignore Megadeth at this point.


RATING - 30%

PS - The Thin Lizzy cover is pretty solid too, though they don't do anything special with it.

Megadeth - Countdown to Extinction

*BA DOW DOWT*

To me, Countdown to Extinction is pretty much the Megadeth album that most accurately and succinctly sums up the band's mission statement.  What would that be, you ask?  For my money, it'd be "Be more successful than Metallica".  Not "be better", not "be more extreme", but "be more successful".  Dave's undying resentment for being kicked out of Metallica for what he perceived as hypocritical reasons (matters of degree is a concept utterly incapable of existing inside a brain as malformed as Mustaine's) has never been a secret, but it seems like a lot of people seem to brush it off or view it as a kind of motivation to make much better music.  Personally, the first three Metallica albums are all better than the first three Megadeth albums, but ever since then Megadeth has pretty solidly had the upper hand.  I will not deny for one second that Rust in Peace blows pretty much everything Metallica has ever released out of the water, and it's a personal Top 10 All Time album for me, but Megadeth on the whole has always annoyed me for being a blatantly one-dimensional band with only one goal in mind, and no album illustrates that better than Countdown to Extinction.

You see, most Megadeth albums have a corresponding Metallica album(s), everything the band has ever done has simply been reacting to what Metallica was doing at the time and trying to beat them at their own game.  Admittedly, they usually succeed, but I just can't bring myself to respect the band (or really just Dave Mustaine, since he's always been the band) as much as their symbolic big brother.  Metallica did the whole sellout thing in 1991, we all know that, but after achieving that monstrous amount of money, fame, and money, they've always just kind of been doing whatever the hell they felt like doing.  They'd reached that point of security where they'd always be famous, people would always clamor to hear a new album, and so they started doing the whole laid back rock thing and whatever the hell St. Anger was.  Megadave on the other hand just seemed to go "Metallica's songs are getting longer and more adventurous?  Well so are mine!  What?  They play commercial hard rock now?  SO DO I!  They're getting heavier again?  Well two can play at that game!".  It's actually really frustrating to me to see a man with such immense songwriting talent and knack for assembling great musicians around him to tie his songwriting to the one-track mindset of "try to do the same thing this one band I have a grudge against does, but do it better than them".  I'd like to see the alternate universe where Dave was never a part of Metallica and instead just had a ton of his own ideas he wanted to unleash.

So around this time, Metallica had become one of the biggest metal/hard rock bands in the world, and so Megadeth of course had to follow suit.  When it comes to the album this was modeled after (The Black Album, obviously), I really like a few songs but overall think the album's just okay.  I think "Nothing Else Matters" is a pretty decent ballad, as is "The Unforgiven", and I really like "Through the Never", and I have a nostalgia-fogged love of "Wherever I May Roam" and "Of Wolf and Man", but I could go the rest of my life without ever hearing "Enter Sandman" or fucking "Sad But True" ever again.  Unsurprisingly, that view kind of parallels with Countdown to Extinction here, as the two big singles ("Symphony of Destruction" and "Sweating Bullets") are pretty far and away the worst songs on display.  It's not necessarily because of how overtly commercial and radio-friendly they are (the other big single, "Foreclosure of a Dream", is most definitely both of those things, and I like that song plenty), but more because they just sound half assed and written in half an hour.  They both ride on the most bewilderingly simplistic mid-paced chugs and place a huge emphasis on the vocals.  This has always been a giant obstacle for me, as let's face it, Dave Mustaine has a fucking wretched singing voice.  His signature snarl is pretty novel at times, and it's certainly recognizable, but as has been posited by people smarter than I, he's a voice you learn to get used to more than actually enjoy.  I've certainly gotten used to his voice I guess, but I still think it's ill-suited to hard rock/heavy metal on display in most of these songs, and is frankly just goddamn annoying.  Some high speed, punk tinged aggression like the first album?  Fine, it fits like a glove.  But for polished commercial mainstream radio metal?  Good god in heaven no!

Apart from the two chuggy, crappy "Sad But True" emulations, Countdown to Extinction also has a bizarro version of "The Unforgiven" in "Foreclosure of a Dream".  The main difference is that the Metallica song features loud verses and a quiet, acoustic chorus, whereas the Megadeth version flip flops it with acoustic verses and a loud, distorted chorus.  Otherwise they're structured pretty much the same apart from the fact that "Foreclosure" moves along at a higher general tempo.  I attribute this to Dave's eternal one-upsmanship, but I prefer this song to its Metallica counterpart so I'll cut it some slack.  The political bent that Dave's lyrics always seem to have is also here in full force, though it ends up being pretty funny in hindsight considering he now stands for the exact opposite of everything he championed on this album.  I guess his reactionary tendencies aren't just contained to writing music based on whatever Metallica is up to, but also to rally against just... whoever is in charge of the United States at the current time.

Past the three singles, I have to admit that this is actually an extremely solid album for a blatant commercial sellout.  I imagine most Rust in Peace fans were disappointed when this dropped since the band's ever evolving complexity has been stunted in favor of a more stripped down and simplistic approach.  The riffwork isn't nearly as creative as the previous four albums on the whole, though it's pretty inconsistent throughout the album ("Sweating Bullets" carries one of the most generic and half-hearted riffsets ever conceived, whereas "Ashes in Your Mouth" could have feasibly sounded at home on the previous classic record).  The guitar work on the whole is actually pretty stunningly hit or miss, hitting bullseye a few times (like the solo on "Skin o' My Teeth" or the chorus melody in the title track), missing the board entirely once or twice (the whole of "Symphony of Desctruction"), but mostly at least hitting 20 or double 15.  That's really what the album is when you pick it apart, it's a mixed bag of elements that they used to do much better, new ideas meant to coincide with the newer direction, and harbingers of some of the utter suckage to come later in their career.

To elaborate on that last part, take a look at "Architecture of Aggression", mainly the chorus.  It's really the first instance I can think of where Dave's lyric writing started being egregiously hamfisted.  I feel like he wrote down those lines as one long sentence, and then tried to find a way to awkwardly fit it into a four line chorus based on this riff he'd already written.  It doesn't match at all and feels like he just starts rambling off words that don't coagulate with the riffs in even the slightest sense.  This problem pretty much reached it's zenith in the mid 00s, with The System has Failed and United Abominations being just absolutely loaded with awkward vocal patterns that mesh with neither the lyrics nor the riffs.  Check out "Of Mice and Men" and "United Abominations" for the most preposterous examples.  This sort of rears its head on tracks like "Captive Honour" and "This was My Life" here, but the aforementioned "Architecture of Aggression" is the most obvious example of Dave trying way too hard to make a point and letting the songwriting suffer by not reworking the music, vocals, or lyrics to match the other elements at play.

I've been pretty negative so far, constantly knocking the band for being Metallica Jr and Dave's increasingly oddball songwriting decisions, but I can't stress enough that I like this album plenty.  "Skin o' My Teeth" is a high speed rocker worthy of any greatest hits collection, featuring an ear catching main riff reminiscent of the very early thrash records like Kill 'em All and Megadeth's own Killing is My Business.  "High Speed Dirt" follows in the same path, though it isn't as memorable (apart from the strangely well executed blues break), while "Ashes in Your Mouth" could well be the most "Megadeth-y" song on display, sounding like an outtake from the Rust in Peace recording sessions with the adventurous riffs, bouncy energy, instantly hooky chorus, and eye melting soloing sections.  Not even all of the dominantly groovy tracks are bad, as "Psychotron" is pretty fun and despite the wretched chorus, I think "Architecture of Aggression" is pretty sweet too.  And then there's the title track, which is somehow really, really good despite having all of the ingredients for a perfect trainwreck.  It's a very simple, almost power ballady paced ode to overt environmentalism with one of Dave's signature awkward chorus, but man they somehow nail this one.  Regardless of the message, usually a track with extraordinarily blatant political messages (not veiled in clever metaphors) are rarely well done enough in my eyes to actually get the message across, but this one manages to be okay by making the song around the lyrics so interesting that I never really need to cringe at the shoehorned message.  The bass line in the beginning is quite memorable and sets the stage for the moody subject matter.  The main draw for me is actually just one simple element, and that's the guitar melody in the chorus.  Holy crap, it's so good.  I have no idea what the lyrics are, I don't care, I sing along to the guitar part instead.  It's incredibly simple yet executed masterfully and ends up being on par with Amon Amarth in the realm of "making very basic, simple riffs/melodies sound fucking awesome". 

The strange thing is that I could also probably say an equal amount of negative things about the album, with the bad tracks alternating between being wholly forgettable ("This was My Life", "Captive Honour") and offensively annoying ("Symphony of Destruction", "Sweating Bullets"), but I really can't help but like the album on the whole.  Really, this is quite similar to Fear of the Dark in the sense that it's really inconsistent and not at all what the band in question is best at, but it was also my first exposure to the band so it'll always have a special place in my heart.  It's very accessible, much more so than the somewhat oddball So Far So Good... or the heavily dark Peace Sells.  At this point in time, Megadeth was doing the whole "do what Metallica do" thing just as obviously as always, and this is probably the most overtly obvious example throughout their whole career with how far removed it is from the previous album, but the popular consensus is correct this time, as it's superior to it's sister album in Metallica's discography.  It's more basic and restrained fairly inconsistent with a few high profile stinkers, but overall you could do a whole lot worse in the realm of commercial metal.  As far as mainstream metal goes, this is definitely a bit of a gem in the sense that the actual singles released into the mainstream mostly suck, but the rest of the album can be pretty good despite the formula not being that much different from said singles.  So basically if you can ignore or skip over the dreadfully boring tracks, it's a pretty solid commercial metal album.  Would I recommend it?  Not really, my love of it is pretty tainted with nostalgia.  Like, I'm sure "This was My Life" is a terrible song, but I like it anyways.  If you've got a hatred for The Black Album, chances are you won't like this instead, and those who say they do are simply being contrarian for the sake of it.  NOT NEGOTIABLE.  NO HYPERBOLE AT ALL.


RATING - 71%

Icarus Witch - Songs for the Lost

You know what else is catchy?  AIDS

Yes, this album is catchy as hell, but I've always maintained that catchiness does not equal quality. This statement has never been exemplified as strongly as it has been on Icarus Witch's sophomore effort, Songs for the Lost. Icarus Witch plays a hard rocking blend of 80s arena rock and Def Leppard power pop... notice the word metal isn't in the description anywhere. I don't consider this album to be metal, is this a bad thing? No, I happen to like Guns n' Roses, however metal they are not. But don't let the guise of the traditional metal tag confuse you, you will bang your head maybe once throughout the duration of this extremely boring record. House of Usher contains some of the only solid riffs, and is probably the highlight of the record.

Now, let's get something straight, when I first heard this band, I proclaimed that it sounded like a slightly heavier Def Leppard with a sedated Geddy Lee on vocals. Now is it any surprise that they cover Def Leppard's Mirror Mirror here? My top 5 least favorite bands of all time are as follows:

1. Air Supply
2. Journey
3. Foreigner
4. Bon Jovi
5. Def Leppard

You'll notice that Def Leppard is the fifth entry on this list. Therefore, pretty much anything bearing even a passing semblance to them is bound to be tossed on to my shit list faster than Rosie O'Donnell to a free taco. And as if the sonic similarity wasn't enough to twiddle my anus for eternity, they covered a fucking Def Leppard song to boot! Congratulations Icarus Witch, any merit you may have had just got launched out the window.

Now, with my irrational hatred for all things Def Leppard aside, Icarus Witch are essentially behind on the times. Hey, I enjoy Municipal Waste and Evile as much as the next guy, but this isn't a good representation of yesteryear like the aforementioned examples are. Listening to Songs for the Lost makes me feel a little queasy... it's like a watered down, shamelessly cheesy 2nd tier 80s arena rock band. I can hear Written in the Stars being played to sold out arenas back in the mid 80s, but given the current timeframe, it's nothing we haven't heard a million times before a million times better. The stripped down riffs only seem to click in a few songs, namely Written in the Stars and House of Usher. In case you can't tell, those are my two favorite songs on this album. There are standout segments of other songs (The Sky is Falling, Devil's Hour), but on the whole the entire thing sounds unoriginal and half assed. Hell, repeated listens even make me wonder how catchy this even is. A lot of choruses tend to drag on forever and aren't ear catching in the slightest. C'mon, I only thought Iron Maiden could pull that off.

One thing I will say though, is that the guitar players are extremely capable, churning out blisteringly fast and intense solos every which way. It's almost like the hair bands from back in the day, you hear a really boring and simplistic riff, yet it is somehow insidiously catchy, and then from out of left field a searing solo melts your face off and then the band starts sucking again. So what this tells me in the case of Icarus Witch, is that the technical skill is there, but the songwriting skills are not yet there. I notice I claimed this album is catchy, yet at the same time boring. While this may seem like two completely opposite things, it actually manages to happen here. It's catchy like Def Leppard's Too Late is. It sucks, it's grating, but it's an ohrwurm that just refuses to go the hell away, plaguing your thoughts until it actually disrupts your sleeping pattern. Y'all know what I'm trying to say, it's catchy, but really bad.

Now, this isn't even close to the lowest score I've given out, so there is obviously some redeeming qualities. As previously stated, some of the songs are catchy in a good way, and some of the riffs are solid. But, as the score indicates, they are few and far between and most of the record is insipid and lifeless. There's very little magic to be found here, but magic is there nonetheless. With some refinement, I feel Icarus Witch could easily be a top tier traditional metal band, but until then, we have this.

I'll say, this can be considered somewhat of a guilty pleasure of mine... but not so much "guilty" like "whoops, I feel like a bit of a dick because I farted in a fancy restaurant and blamed it on my girlfriend". No, this is "guilty" on par with "oh shit, I got drunk and accidentally ran my truck over a group of preschoolers", the kind of guilt that ends marriages, the kind of guilt that would prompt one to leap from their high rise apartment onto the comforting cushion of concrete. I really dislike this album, yet I find myself spinning Written in the Stars every now and again... it's bizarre.

Try it out if you don't mind arena rock, but don't expect a fresh take on the style. Innovation isn't a necessity, and this isn't as unoriginal as Stormwarrior, but at least Stormwarrior pull it all off with a flair and conviction that really makes a band. Songs for the Lost is a very bland record with few redeeming factors, I'd advise to stay away from it.

RATING - 25%