Wintersun - Time II

Imagine there's a pic of the album art on the left because Blogger is refusing to let me upload images right now

Feel free to skip this first paragraph, it is admittedly self-indulgent and tangential, but I feel like the best way I can explain Time II and my feelings on it is through a punchline that requires a bit of setup.  A big early inspiration of mine when it came to reviewing was Noah Antweiler, better known as The Spoony One, an OG "angry internet reviewer" whose content has, by and large, aged like milk.  Despite no longer finding it funny to change the lyrics of "Liberi Fatali" from Final Fantasy VIII to all be variations of "gay" and "sissy", I actually still hold his three-part review of the game Ultima IX: Ascension in pretty high regard for almost entirely metatextual reasons.  The review itself is ostensibly just a joke and skit laden diatribe against a game he really hates from a series he had previously really loved, but the review functions in hindsight as something of a character study of a man whose manic period finally climaxed and began to flip into a depressive period at the exact same time as the consequences of his flippant, selfish behavior during his manic years came home to roost.  The real-life circumstances of his life that had taken a major downturn in between the filming of each part weighs so heavily on him that you can see him physically and mentally decay with each new installment.  He visibly loses weight, his criticisms become less about ticky-tack mechanical nitpicks and more about overarching philosophical failures, and he lashes out at the world in a way that is explicitly reflective of his lived reality, where his own behavior cost him his job, reputation, and friends and his struggle to reckon with that.  It's a captivating watch if you're familiar with his self-destructive backstory.  The part that's important here, and one of the pivotal moments in his own filmed meta-collapse, comes during a section where he describes a sidequest in the game.  At one point, he is tasked with scouring the world to find four gemstones.  They are scattered all across the world map, with little to no direction as to where to even start looking to find any of them.  It takes nearly the entire length of the game to complete and requires a huge load of backtracking.  After spending dozens of hours replaying a game that is already miserable to play, a game that symbolizes his personal loss of childhood wonder and the most potent, soul-destroying disappointment he had ever experienced, just to fetch all of these items, the reward is revealed to be a measly 100 gold pieces.  Less money than he could have made by simply turning around and stabbing a rat in a random encounter.  It would have been less insulting if the reward was simply nothing at all.

What can you possibly say about Time II?  No, that's not a rhetorical question.  What can you, I, or anybody else on Earth say about the substance of this album that is of any value to yourself, myself, or anybody else on Earth?  I need to lay my thesis out right at the start here.  Reviews are, by nature, subjective critiques of art.  They necessarily must be so because a review is predicated on having an opinion about something.  I am frequently criticized for being too subjective in my writing, and that is not going to change today, but the core problem with Wintersun's long awaited new album is actually an objective one.  You can not refute this, you can not say I am incorrect or misinformed, you can not claim I am interpreting the facts uncharitably to make an unfair point, there is absolutely no coherent counterargument to this 100% indisputable fact: Time II is the second half of an album that was released 12 years ago and written 18 years ago.

That's it, right?  Like, what the fuck else can you or I or anybody else on Earth amend on to the end of that statement that softens the cold haymaker of reality here?  Time II is an album that fundamentally can not be divorced from the surrounding non-musical circumstances of its creation and release.  And the most distilled version of those circumstances is "This album was written and at least partially recorded in 2006, five songs were released in 2012, and six more were released in 2024".  Everything experiential about this album will forever be colored by the looming shadow of the previous eighteen years.

Why talk about how "Way of the Fire" is an okay song that goes on a little too long when the fact is that it's been written and performed live for eons by this point?  Why talk about "Silver Leaves" being one of the exceptionally few examples of Jari writing slower parts that are actually engaging on some level when the fact is that fans have endured ten straight years of him caterwauling about how no computer exists that could fully realize what is so nakedly a perfectly unremarkable symphonic melodeath song?  Why talk about how much of the runtime is occupied by atmospheric intros/interludes/outros when the fact is that the band raised hundreds of thousands of euros to do so?  Why talk about the mix being fine for what it is if a little bit crowded when the fact is that the album's production is the entire impetus of several rounds of fundraising and empty promises and there is apparently already a cleaner mix available if you purchase it for forty bucks from the band directly?  Who cares what happens in "Storm"?  The fact is that it's the penultimate song on an album that spent more time in the polishing stage than my dog's entire natural fucking lifespan and at the end of the day all that got delivered was a pretty fine if sorta unfocused album in a genre that had iterated itself beyond any boundaries that Time could've theoretically pushed two god damned decades ago.  Who cares?  Brymir released four different versions of this already and they weren't all that spectacular either.

It seems wrong, but it's just true, the actual substance of the album just full stop does not matter.  At the end of the day, it's the second half of an album that was released 12 years ago and written 18 years ago.  I'll keep saying it, because it absolutely bears repeating.  There is absolutely nothing this album could've done that could've justified the slow-motion circus fire that led up to it.  Time's legacy was never going to be its music, it was always going to be its story.  The worst thing it could've done was conclude that story, because now we're forced to reckon with the fact that fans could've heard this in 2008 like it was initially planned and nothing would be fundamentally different about it.  With that in mind, are you pleased with this result?  Is Time II worth at least a few percentage points on principle because the instruments are in tune and the growls sound good?  Of course not, this isn't a physics exam, it's a piece of art, and it's art that I find spectacularly artless and unworthy of merit.  Do you really care that "Ominous Clouds" is a filler interlude or that Jari's clean vocals are still goofy as hell?  I don't think you do.  I think you care that Time II is finally released and yep it sure sounds like half of a Wintersun album.  Hope that's enough for ya!

Perfect is often the enemy of good but it turns out that it can be the spectre that mediocrity spends a lifetime promising as well.  I used to champion the belief that Jari was a conman who had been sitting on his ass and demanding money for years, but I no longer believe that.  No, the only remaining possibility is that he must be an idiot.  To spend so much of your limited time on this planet spit-shining a turd that you shit out back before X-Men 3 came out is the choice of a gibbering lunatic.  I fully believe that he spent all of this time futzing around with DAWs and tweaking the levels of three hundred simultaneous fake trumpets because these songs sound like they haven't gone through a second pass since the Younger Bush administration.  It doesn't sound lazy, you don't invest so much of your reputation on an album that you refuse to release until its perfect if you weren't actually trying.  But it ultimately sounds dated on arrival.  You can't dazzle me with nine straight minutes of blastbeats or bombastic synths anymore because the world moved on while you were busy dazzling yourself in your imagination with a hypothetical version of it.  This is what happens when you're so incurious that you assume your artistic whims are unimpeachable.  The intervening years weren't spent reworking or rewriting these songs, they were spent trying to make the noises in Jari's headphones match what he envisioned in his head twenty years ago.   That these songs never stopped being an animating force in his artistic career is not a sign of perfectionism or creative drive, it's a sign that the creator assumed any possible improvement could only be achieved via means completely disconnected from their fundamental building blocks.   That's not the action of a genius, it's the action of a child who refuses to finish their drawing until they find the exact perfect shade of blue crayon.  It's like winding up a punch for 155,000 hours as though that's going to make it land 155,000 times harder when really all it accomplishes is making you look like a fuckin' clown.

Is this good enough for you?  Is this worth all of the time and effort it took to realize?  Does this album sound like it was worth a half million dollar paywall that took a decade to unlock?  If so, I'm genuinely happy for you.  I don't understand you and will not value any artistic insights you offer, but I am glad that this makes you happy.  Time II could've come bundled with a gold ingot and Sofia Vergara's phone number and it would still be the second half of an album that was released 12 years ago and written 18 years ago.  Nothing will ever assuage the fact that it would've been less insulting if it was never released at all.

RATING: 0%

My 2023 AOTY was Xoth by the way.

In Flames - Foregone

Somehow better and worse than mediocre

I'm gonna be reviewing this album in a vacuum, due primarily to simple disinterest in the band after not caring for the few post-Reroute tracks I'd heard after only really latching onto a handful of classic tunes as a teenager anyway.  I figured they weren't really for me and negative word of mouth combined with dreadfully confusing aesthetic choices seemed to confirm that.  But hey, "Embody the Invisible" popped into my head the other day and I thought "Man, that song seriously fucks.  I wonder what they actually sound like nowadays?" and thus gave their newest, Foregone a cursory listen.  In Flames is easily the biggest and most divisive metal band that I've completely avoided Capital D Discourse on so I have a twenty-plus year gap in my knowledge and never cared about personnel changes or primary songwriters in the band, so this is probably going to be one of the shockingly few reviews that isn't predicated on comparing it to their recent albums.  

What this sounds like to me is basically a pretty solid metalcore album from the mid aughts heyday of the genre (seriously add like three open string breakdowns to a few songs and this is an early Avenged Sevenfold album).  Metalcore was always heavily based in melodeath anyway and In Flames was probably the biggest metal influence on the whole sound, and what this tells me is that the band simply assimilated into the genre that they inadvertently helped invent.  There are tons of explosive sections that run sheer aggression, notably in tracks like "Foregone pt.1" and "State of Slow Decay", but I'd say the primary feature are the cleanly sung choruses.  This is a shame because those are almost uniformly the worst part of any given song.  I recall a few moments of clean singing on Colony that weren't good at all, but this new style he's adopted are just straight up cringe inducing.  They are so overwhelmingly sweet that they've rotted out all of their teeth.  Otherwise quite good tracks like "Meet Your Maker" are severely undercut by these absolutely awful clean vocals that sound straight out of the least catchy Periphery song you've ever heard.  I have no idea why they're so prominent since they clash so strongly with everything surrounding them.  They're all slathered in some sort of effect that makes them sound... well not quite autotuned but somehow fake anyway, like you fed an AI a bunch of Killswitch Engage songs and it spit out a rudimentary approximation of the A Day to Remember guy with none of his warmth or charisma (which is already disastrously lacking).  They're the weakest element of the entire album by a mile and they make good songs flawed ("Meet Your Maker") and bad songs unbearable ("Pure Light of Mind").  "Bleeding Out" goes from a pretty okay chuggy/groovy song to a damn near unlistenable splattering of saccharine pap once the chorus hits, it is astounding how ruinous these vocals are.  They're like a 50% accurate Ghost impression on "Foregone pt.2" and I'll never understand how not one person raised their hand in the studio and suggested a second take that didn't sound quite so comically embarrassing.  I involuntarily started giggling when the music dropped out for a nearly a cappella moment during "In the Dark".  Special mention has to go to "Pure Light of Mind" for being so, so much worse than anything else on the album.  Anders is the worst part of that song of course but the structure and presentation is so sickeningly harmless that it's damn near nauseating.  Anybody pegging that one as a highlight can be safely ignored because holy shit it's the absolute worst song on the album and it's not even close.

Excepting those truly atrocious moments, the rest of the album has some seriously good bones to build on.  Amazingly, the vocals are pretty good when they stay harsh.  It blows my mind that Anders can be such an atrocious, ill fitting clean singer while also supplying such intense harsh vocals.  Sure there's nothing quite as feral as the "Will forever wander alone" bit in "Embody the Invisible" but he delivers some excellent intensity when he stops himself from sounding like Martin Steene with a swoopy haircut. There's more chugging than the best As I Lay Dying albums but they tend to come across as pounding instead of plodding.  Tracks like "State of Slow Decay" kick things into an astoundingly high gear for a bunch of middle aged men who apparently abandoned speed and aggression well over a decade ago and I'd be willing to say that "The Great Deceiver" would slot in perfectly on any of those classic 90s albums.  "Foregone pt.1" kicking off with delicious blast beats and infectious lead hooks is exactly the kind of thing that I had secretly hoped they would've done more of on those old albums instead of "just" being Iron Maiden with growls.  The first half is clearly superior and the last four songs all kinda blend into one big megasong but it never truly hits a bad patch with a bunch of terrible songs in a row.

There's a real sense of identity here that's wholly separate from the era that gave them so much clout in the first place and manages to be good on its own.  There's a sort of intangible confidence throughout Foregone and I think that's why it's endeared itself to me despite the achilles heel being so unavoidably pervasive.  They toy with a couple different ideas, and not all of them work, but my Cynical Asshole alarm isn't going off while listening to this, it really does feel like the band truly believed in every one of these ideas, both the Clayman throwbacks and whatever dross "Bleeding Out" is supposed to be.  As a guy who hasn't listened to a note of the band since 2007, jumping in all these years later has revealed them to be suddenly playing this very nebulous mashup of all sorts of heavy genres.  Like there's is so much vibrant bounciness to a plurality of the riffs that I can only assume it comes from nu metal (I don't know how else to describe it: groove metal grooves, nu metal bounces, this album bounces), the choruses are pulled straight from emotional metalcore, the heaviest moments are unabashedly melodic death metal, et cetera.  It all coalesces into something that resembles an alternative tinged Napalm Records style corsetcore pop metal that occasionally licks its teeth and suddenly ejaculates Whoracle at you.  I guess if I had to explain what "alternative metal" should sound like if genre-obsessed giganerds ever bothered to codify it, I'd reckon it'd be something like this.

The main reason I was never able to truly get into In Flames as a teenager in the first place is because I felt like the quality of any given song was an absolute coinflip, constantly rocketing between rousing, evocative barnburners and the most unengaging shit imaginable.  It's kinda nostalgic to check in on the band for the first time in nearly two decades and learn that they're still struggling with that exact same problem.  I hate to sound like some kind of grouchy luddite but the fact is simply that In Flames, despite toying with increasingly modern, glossy, and unthreatening elements throughout recent decades, seemingly still aren't all that good at incorporating them while they still have genuine skill in replicating the early style that made them metal legends in the first place.  Foregone is such a strange experience for somebody who lacks as much context as I do, because I have no idea if the bad parts are any better or worse than the last six albums.  There are a lot of flaws and a lot of the ideas are largely unappealing in isolation, but there's a je ne sais quoi that keeps me from outright saying it sucks despite only truly enjoying like three songs without caveats.  What the fuck am I supposed to do with that, ratingwise?  Like it's not good enough to just be good, and it's definitely bad enough to just be bad but that's only truly regarding certain elements that coat the whole experience like a fine mist, and most of the songs are inoffensive but uninspiring but are simultaneously better and worse than mediocre.  What kind of mobius strip of a grading scale would such an anomaly even map onto?  

 Ƭ̵̬̊ %

Aerith - For the Fallen

Can you hear the planet crying out in pain?
 

I know singles are frowned upon for the Diamhea Challenge, but I'm determined to stick with this theme and this is the last band I can find any music from and this particular single seems to be the only release actually based on FF if we're going by lyrics alone.  Aerith is notable for being the side project of Ken Bedene, the drummer for Aborted, handling drums and guitar, with his dad Frankie on bass and some rando on vocals.  "For the Fallen" is a nice enough melodeath tune obviously based on FFVII, but that's about all the musical description I can bear to muster for this.  It's a very simple, stock template melodeath song based mostly on Clayman era In Flames and that's about as far as the creativity goes.  It's a far cry from the pugilistic death metal of Aborted and I'd've never known this was Bedene's brainchild if I wasn't told outright.  All told it's one of those releases that covers well-trodden ground pretty thoroughly, but it's well done enough that any fan of the style will enjoy it.  The vocals sound like if Anders Friden didn't suck, the harmonized leads never stop but never really get dull either, the solo is flashy and exciting, and the song itself is structured very basically but does its job well enough.  So this isn't something I'd really recommend seeking out but if you like 90s In Flames/Dark Tranquillity then I don't see why you wouldn't like this either.  For me personally though, I wish this stretched its legs a little more and tried to do something a little more creative as opposed to just doing something that's already been done better by hundreds of bands decades earlier.

RATING: 59%

Starforger - Meteorfall

It's morphing time!
 

Third time's the charm, because now we've finally hit a band that is both unquestionably based on Final Fantasy lore and doesn't suck!  This is the nerd-paradise I was hoping I'd come across when I started this project, with five of the six tracks being unquestionably based on FF without being covers (you'd be amazed how few FF "inspired" bands I was able to find that weren't just endless covers of battle themes straight from the games).  This EP starts off with the one-two punch of "Hellfire" and "Diamond Dust", obviously based on staple summons Ifrit and Shiva, and then leads into "Five Hundred Years Later" based on the ambiguous epilogue to VII, followed by "Rose of May" telling the story of IX's Beatrix (the only acceptable waifu, fight me you weeb-pedo freaks), and climaxing with "The Sword Collector", based on The Absolute Boy Gilgamesh, his V incarnation specifically.  The sixth track seems to be unrelated, but was tacked on to the 2020 rerelease so hypernerds like me can safely avoid talking about it.

But enough expository banter!  Starforger's actual sound is closer to Wintersun than anybody else, replete with loads of twinkly keyboards and speedy guitar acrobatics.  I've said many times before that Wintersun's main downfall is simply that the brains behind the band can't rein himself in and just make great, focused songs with any regularity, so despite my vocal distaste for the band I do frequently seek out bands that sound like them, and Starforger does that very well.  Hell "The Sword Collector" cribs so heavily from Wintersun's "Battle Against Time" that it borders on plagiarism, but the overall package is a fuckload more consistent than anything the Finns have ever managed to put out.  

 

That actually winds up being the achilles heel of Meteorfall.  It's extremely consistent but this comes at the expense of every song sounding basically the same.  All six of them are fairly lengthy blasts of aggression that rarely slow down, full of catchy melodies, prominent synths, blast beats, and deep growls.  It's a great example of this particular power-metal-heavy subniche of melodeath but once you've heard the first song you've heard them all, as they all follow more or less the exact same template with the only real difference between them being their length.  The keys seem to be the real star of the show, with what I can only assume is a nod to "J-E-N-O-V-A" opening "Hellfire" and an absolutely sublime chorus melody in "Five Hundred Years Later", and just generally being the most interesting part of any given song.  The rest of the instrumentals are no slouch, don't get me wrong, but they clearly play second fiddle to the high-flying twinkliness that overpowers the album.  Despite how samey Meteorfall is on the whole, I can't deny that I had a lot of fun with it.  Starforger is without a doubt the best FF themed metal band that actually plays originals that I've come across on this journey, but I'd be lying to you if I said it was fantastic.  It's just a damn solid Wintersun knockoff but I can jive with that.

RATING: 78%

RELITIGATING HIGH SCHOOL Vol IV: Trivium - Ascendancy

I'm not making the boat rudder joke
 

I've recently learned about the theory that the kind of music you hate the most tends to actually be superficially similar to the kind you love the most.  Your natural assumption would be that somebody's least favorite style of music is the one the most opposite to their favorite, but ask any outlaw country fan what they think of Florida Georgia Line, or any jazz fan what they think of Kenny G's schlock.  Most pertinent to this series, ask any underground metalhead in 2005 what the worst genre was and they'd probably say metalcore.  The idea is that this is due to a sort of "musical uncanny valley", where you hate what you hate the most because it's almost something you love, but something about it is just too off, too artificial, too wrong to truly be what it is you love, and that gives us a sort of fight-or-flight reaction of visceral disgust.  I've been thinking about this a lot as I explore these metalcore bands for this series, and I think Trivium here is the poster child for metal's uncanny valley.  I know I spend a lot of time harping on how metalloids are obsessed with aesthetics and reflexively reject bands that don't look the part, and I still think that's true to an extent, but this way of thinking has really helped me to understand why this entire scene got shat on by the underground for so long, and Trivium in particular got it real bad.  They were an internet punching bag for years and I didn't even really question it.  Of course they sucked, I mean come on, have you listened to them?

 

I didn't start this series with the intention of pointing at maligned releases and just saying "Thing Good, Actually", but it was inevitable that it would happen at least once and I'm just as surprised as you are that Trivium wound up being the lucky winner.

The reason I think Trivium hit that musical uncanny valley more than any of their peers is because holy shit I never realized how 80s these songs are.  Seriously!  There are loads of things for classic metal fans to enjoy here, mostly in the absolute heaps of influence they took from Metallica and Iron Maiden.  The Crusade is obviously their "We're thrash now for real please respect us" album, but Ascendancy is the one I remember being their breakthrough and the one that started all the backlash, and I can see why people had that reaction to it.  Sure there are tons of dueling solos and harmonized melodies and bona fide thrash riffs, but there is enough that's just left-of-center enough to feel inauthentic.  Something simple is the fact that the album is played in Drop D tuning.  For the non musicians, all you really need to know is that dropped tunings simply aren't the approach that most bands take if they're aiming for the sound Trivium was aiming for here.  That's more the domain of grunge, nu metal, and, well, metalcore.  It's very easy to get huge sounding powerchords that jump around the neck with that top string down a step and it's conducive to writing big fuckin' breakdowns and really fast chug riffs (both of which this album doesn't necessarily shy away from, in fairness).  Hearing somebody take that tuning and basically rewrite "Trapped Under Ice" with it just feels different, and even if you don't know or understand all that, your brain picks up on it.  The tuning isn't the be-all-end-all wrong part, but it's one element of several that divorces Ascendancy from its roots just enough to feel like some sort of forgery.

But honestly, it's not really an impostor because the music is surprisingly legit.  That opening attack of "Rain" is absolutely devastating, "Drowned and Torn Asunder" is genuinely just thrash metal with a beefier low end, "Declaration" sounds like a squadron of machine guns, "A Gunshot to the Head of Trepidation" has a main riff that sports an incredibly infectious hook and transitions into some of the most Maiden melodies that Maiden never wrote.  Everywhere I look there's something else I enjoy.  My memory told me this had very pedestrian drumming but it's actually mega energetic, and the solos are some of the best the genre ever produced.  The sound is great, the songs generally smash (though of course the more melodic ballady songs like "Departure" and "Dying in Your Arms" are incredibly boring and throw a monkey wrench in the album's momentum), hell even the common problem of bands strictly adhering to pop song structures isn't as obvious or irritating this time, even though they pump out a lot of standard verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-solo-chorus songs regardless.  There's enough variety in approach that it doesn't get nearly as tiring as it did with Killswitch.  The cliches are still here of course, the choruses are almost uniformly cleanly sung and the most intense part of any given song is the first fifteen seconds, but it feels less dogmatic and more loose here.

However there's an elephant in the room here.  I haven't brought up the vocals yet, and that's because "Beefy" Matt Heafy has the absolute worst scream in the scene.  His harsh vocals are unbearably inept, to the point where they genuinely hinder my enjoyment to a surprising degree.  His cleans are fine, unremarkable but serviceable, but his harsh vocals are leagues below anybody else I've heard so far.  They're very hoarse and scratchy, like somebody running their nails down drywall.  He sounds like he was moderately thirsty but decided to track every single song in one long take before getting a glass of water.  I like to imagine his clean voice is his only real voice, and the screams are just the result of something like that Finnish cough drop commercial where the black metal guy takes a lozenge and then starts singing like Pavarotti.  That bit at the end of the second verse of "Pull Harder on the Strings of Your Martyr" where he goes "I'LL BURN YOUR WOLLL" sounds drier than Ben Shapiro's wife.  More than anything, Trivium needed to tell Heafy to just stick to guitar while they hired a real vocalist, because he's pretty good at guitar and unbelievably bad at vocals.  I know Trivium is still releasing new albums to this day and I hope to god he's either improved or dropped them entirely to focus on clean singing, because god damn I can not stress enough how awful they are.  Imagine starting a thrash band and then letting some kid who has never screamed before but was into Terror last summer handle the vocals, because that's not too far off from what we got here.

It's such a shame that the vocals are as bad as they are, because they're really the only element of the album that I actually think sucks.  On an instrumental level Ascendancy sits somewhere in the high 70s/low 80s range; not great but it's consistently quite good.  But those screams are so prominent and so bad that they seriously shave off like twenty fuckin' percent off the final score for me.  Running classic non-extreme metal through a filter of modern melodeath that makes it both heavier and catchier should be easy as hell to do, but the vocal choices they made here just amount to a stake through the heart.

RATING: 62%

RELITIGATING HIGH SCHOOL Vol. I: Shadows Fall - The War Within

If you've been around here for a while, you may remember my aborted Preteen Wasteland series from a few years ago, where I planned to revisit the nu metal albums I loved as a tween with the added gimmick of my mom writing a paragraph for each review since we listened to this albums together all the time.  It petered out because that gimmick was a gamble that didn't pay off, since she's a much more busy person than I am and just never found the time to revisit all of these old albums her dumbass son liked twenty years ago (if you're curious, the only albums that held up for me were Wisconsin Death Trip and Iowa, and Linkin Park, despite not being very enjoyable, at least stood out for their vocalists being one of the only good singers and the only rapper who clearly actually rapped for a living in the entire genre).  The secret part of all that is that I had a sequel series also planned, and now three years later I'm finally gonna take a break from playing Dragon Quest to get started on it.

 

I mentioned that I grew out of nu metal because as I got older, I got more interested in classic 80s metal and started to reject new, modern movements out of hand.  Because of this, the entire "NWOAHM" scene completely passed me by as it was happening.  Metal fans at school would see my Metallica shirt and try to start a conversation, and I'd snottily dismiss them based on their Killswitch Engage shirt and stupid haircut.  I'm sorry, does your shit thrash?  Then I don't fuckin' care, Kyle.  So help me god if I hear one god damned breakdown or one lyric about being sad then I'm going to screech like King Diamond at you until you leave me the hell alone.  It's no surprise that the few friends I had were also lame nerds.  

But now that I'm in my thirties and much less needlessly aggressive in every interaction, I think it's time I took a walk down memory lane, back into the halls of my high school, and take a look at the alternate timeline where I actually gave Kyle the time of day and gave his bands a shot.  The criteria here is fairly broad.  I'm going to be looking at the bands that had a foothold in the mainstream between ~2003-2006 that were netting good slots at Ozzfest, getting rotation on WZZN, and basically contributing to the musical zeitgeist of my generation that I stubbornly refused to even listen to because they probably didn't sound enough like Overkill and I desperately wanted the approval of the Elder Metalheads online.  From the initial boom of metalcore facilitated by As I Lay Dying, to the easier listening alternative emo metalcore or whatever the fuck Bullet for My Valentine was, to the nebulous blend of melodeath, thrash, and groove metal that Lamb of God made cool.  I'm not going in order of chronological release date this time, I'm just gonna sit here and think of a half dozen or so bands and albums from this era that I snobbily dismissed and go look at them with fresh senses.  You with me?  Let's go!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Light that Blands
 

Shadows Fall apparently has a pretty storied history within this niche, being one of the earlier bands to form (way back in 1995) and pulling an In Flames by having "Land" Phil Labonte (the meathead dipshit from All That Remains) sing on their first album before landing their iconic vocalist in "Flyin'" Brian Fair, and also accomplishing the rare feat of keeping a stable lineup for a solid 15 years and releasing several influential albums in a row with the same group of dudes in the studio.  That's why I'm choosing to start this series with them as opposed to bigger bands that broke out earlier.  Shadows Fall just kinda passes the smell test a bit better in terms of being a statuesque institution in the scene almost entirely due to their stability and, if fans are to be believed, consistency.  We're going to be looking at 2004's The War Within purely because a quick skim of the tracklist reveals some names that I vaguely remember hearing on the radio, so I'm not starting completely blind.

Let me tell you, I feel like a door in some deeply buried temple in my mind unlocked when I heard the main riff of "What Drives the Weak" that starts around the eleven second mark.  That fuckin' octave-slide-to-gallop-chug-to-pinch-harmonic brought back so many memories.  Hearing that was like unlocking the overworld map in Zelda.  It turns out that not only do I remember that riff, I also remember every note and lyric to not only "What Drives the Weak", but also "Inspiration on Demand" and "The Light that Blinds", the three I passively heard on the radio as a teenager.  This might seem like personal fluff to pad out the review but really I think it speaks to how finely tuned Shadows Fall's songwriting is.  These hooks never left my brain after picking them up via audial osmosis a decade and a half earlier.  The aggression inherent in most metal is definitely there in the speedy double bass and harsh vocals, but these guys have a very keen ear for melody and hooks, absolutely nailing that nexus between simplicity and complexity by crafting catchy riffs and In Flames style melodies that are different enough to be instantly recognizable and simple enough to be easily remembered.  The abundance of squealing guitar solos keeps The War Within recognizably metallic in its theatricality and the equal abundance of simplistic chugs and breakdowns interspersed between the high tempo melodeath riffing keeps it recognizably emblematic of the time in which it was made.  This is As I Lay Dying for thrash kids, and I absolutely should've loved this as a teen.

The problem arises when you listen beyond those three singles, because Shadows Fall definitely suffers from the same problem Lamb of God frequently fell victim to.  The War Within has a few obvious highlights and then a bunch of filler.  They're excellent at crafting these memorable hooks, but they're very reliant on a small handful of tricks to achieve this effect, and it doesn't take long for the simplified pop song verse-chorus structure to reveal itself to be a very workmanlike project.  Apart from the closest thing the scene probably had to a power ballad in "Inspiration on Demand" and the sweet guitar lick that opens "The Light that Blinds", the remaining eight tracks are all more or less interchangeable.  "What Drives the Weak" is clearly the best one thanks to that tasty main riff, memorable chorus, bass licks in the pre-chorus, and soaring leads, but everything else sounds like previous drafts of that song before the screws were fully tightened.  I've listened to this like four or five times in preparation for this review and I still can't remember what "Act of Contrition" or "Ghosts of Past Failures" sounds like.  "The Power of I and I" really should stand out for the first thirty seconds being honest to god Cannibal Corpse worship, but it very quickly shifts gears back into that nebulous monogenre that took America by storm in the mid aughts.  

 

It really doesn't help that Fair is uh... more "recognizable" as a vocalist than he is "good".  That's not to say he's bad necessarily, but his gruff monotone quasi-scream is basically musical wallpaper and it gets to be distracting when you pay attention to it.  It sounds like Fair knows that you can avoid damage to your vocal chords by screaming more from your diaphragm than from your throat, but he never really nailed the technique in such a way that would allow him to sound as menacing as he's likely trying to sound.  As a result they're very breathy and clearly layered over themselves a few times throughout the whole album, so they come off more like talk-level yells with a volume boost.  That legitimate death metal influence does shine through occasionally with random deep roars, but they're depressingly uncommon.  Shadows Fall is very much a guitar band, all of their best elements revolve around the riffs and solos, so it's bizarre to me that the vocals often take center stage considering how mediocre they are compared to the rest of the band.  If my memory is correct, the guitarists are the ones who handle the clean vocals that invariably carry every chorus, and they're fine I guess, but it just sorta adds to the plug-and-play nature of the songwriting.  The individual elements are occasionally fantastic, but the old dichotomy of "harsh aggressive verses - clean melodic choruses" never breaks, and it gets old very quickly.

The instrumental element of the band is surprisingly great, but the vocals are an obvious weak link and the songwriting is very formulaic.  As a result, The War Within is basically a blur of faceless aggression with a handful of spikes in quality every three tracks or so.  As much as I'd love to hear more of those death metal roots poking through, I feel like leaning into them any more than they have would fundamentally change what the band was going for, so that feels like an unfair way to critique the album, especially when all the best parts are clearly rooted in American melodeath instead of orthodox death metal anyway.  The overall color of the album is "grey".  Any splashes of vibrance to be found are pretty neatly sequestered into the handful of great songs and the rest of the album feels like a tedious sidequest before getting back to the good songs.  I'm still gonna give it a positive score because god dammit I really like the three songs I highlighted early on and the rest of the album is fundamentally very similar to them, but on the whole it loses its lustre pretty quickly.  If nothing else, I feel like this is a great primer to this scene because everything that made it what it is is here to some extent, and I feel confident in saying that everything I check out from this point on will focus on one element found here more than the rest.

RATING: 66%

10 YEAR REUNION: Blood Stain Child - Epsilon

It's a thing alright

Okay so it's less than ten years old, fight me.  I'm choosing to jump way ahead and redo something outside the purview of this series less because the original review was written poorly (though I definitely did that "lol japan so wacky" thing that I've grown to despise), but because while homophobia wasn't my intent when writing it, I definitely leaned on some insensitive tropes when trying to describe how sugary and poppy this album is.  I didn't really want to do the performative self flagellation thing, but I just know some smartass is going to bring it up so I'm getting ahead of it.  Eat my balls.

Epsilon is a weird album, though I suppose that was obvious from just a passing glance.  Take a look at that Waifu Fantasy XIII aesthetic and whatever music popped into your head probably wasn't too far from the truth.  This is the dumbest shit in the world, with effort-free pop melodies and exuberant dance beats taking up the lion's share of the runtime, usually slathered liberally over the top of punchy melodeath.  The dudes from Disarmonia Mundi contribute guest vocals on a few tracks, and man that just makes so much sense since what I remember of that shitty band was basically this exact kind of not-metalcore-but-the-exact-niche-of-melodeath-that-metalcore-always-rips-off.  That describes most of the heavy elements at play within Epsilon.  The drums are louder than the guitars by a pretty huge magnitude and it's produced to be weirdly trebly, and it does create a neat effect with the electronic elements by never being beefy enough to truly clash, it does tend to cause the cymbals to sound like a neverending fog of white noise in the background.  It winds up being more of a bap than a boom, punching through the sonic center with gusto whenever the percussion picks up.  People smarter than I am tell me that the non-metal elements at play here belong to a subgenre known as "trance", but that's way out of my wheelhouse as a guy who listened to an Infected Mushroom album once before going back to my Slayer records so I'll just take their word for it.

But despite the overwhelming amount of sugar and pop sensibility on top of aggressive melodeath, the actual weirdest part about this album is the fact that it actually wound up being solidly decent.  In fact I think it's enjoyable despite the gimmicky genre clashing, because the songs that are the clearest attempt at blending the two sides of the band's coin 50/50 wind up pretty awkward.  "Eternal" is a great example, with this cute animu girl cooing sweetly over blastbeats just sounding confused and odd for the sake of it.  There are four songs here I genuinely think are great that I've gone back to listen to plenty over the years, and they're split pretty cleanly between the light and heavy sides of the band.  "Sirius IV" and "LA+" focus much more on punchy and aggressive metal, while "Stargazer" and "Moon Light Wave" are basically pure electronic dance pop with guitars vaguely gesturing at distortion in the background.  That's not to say that they're only good when they're picking a side, "Dedicated to Violator" is a very un-metal track and it does absolutely nothing for me, but the hooks on the two aforementioned happy dance songs are phenomenal.  I've never really bothered listening to the rest of Blood Stain Child's catalog but a part of me really hopes they kinda just ditched metal altogether because "Stargazer" is far and away the best track on here and it's the one that flirts with metal the least awkwardly. 

Oddly enough there isn't much to say about this, really.  It's melodeath + trance and that's pretty much the beginning and end of it.  Some of it is surprisingly great and even the lame songs have some pretty infectious hooks, but there's no denying that the styles are pretty abrasive when it comes to actually comingling with one another.  It's a novel oddity that spits out a few surprisingly good tracks with "Stargazer" and "Moon Light Wave" but most of it is honestly just transparent filler.  The good songs are good enough to keep me coming back throughout the years but never for much longer than a quick sightseeing tour before going back to other bands that at least blended their disparate ideas more cohesively.

RATING: 59%

10 YEAR REUNION: Children of Bodom - Are You Dead Yet?

YOU SHOULD GIVE A FLYING FUCK MOTHERFUCKER

I've touched on it before, but I just want to reiterate something I like to call "Roy's Law", which states "The quality of any given Bodom album is inversely proportional to how violent the Grim Reaper on the cover is acting."  On the great albums (the first three, Halo of Blood) he stands beckoning or remorseful, a mysterious figure symbolizing the inevitable end that awaits us all.  On the awful albums (Blooddrunk, Relentless Reckless Forever) he's violently murdering somebody.  Bodom was never a particularly deep band, they are famous for Alexi making up half the lyrics on the spot in the studio and he drops more f-bombs per minute than a shitty Rob Zombie flick after all, but there's a certain meta-poetry in the fact that how stupid and brainless their mascot is acting at any given time tends to mirror how stupid and brainless the music contained inside will be.  The only real hitch in this theory is their fifth album, Are You Dead Yet?  This one features Roy menacingly glaring at you from behind some screen, clearly inspired by The Ring, so like... does this one count as mid-murder?  Is this merely ominous?

The music contained wherein this time tends to confirm both interpretations, and unsurprisingly this album winds up being something of a mess.  Hate Crew Deathroll was, at the time, clearly a transition album, moving from the hyperactive "Nightwish with yowling" style they pioneered into a style more outwardly heavy and rooted in actual melodeath, so Are You Dead Yet? was, initially at least, seen as the logical endpoint of what they were aiming towards in 2003.  In a post Blooddrunk world, however, this is more clearly a second phase to the transition, retaining some of the high flying acrobatics of the classic era while further pushing their sound into the realm of downtuned chug riffs and bare-knuckled brutality.  This style wasn't Bodom's strength necessarily, but tracks like "Sixpounder" fucking ruled so logically there's no reason they wouldn't be good at this as well.  And honestly?  For about thirteen minutes they absolutely do showcase some serious talent in more simplified songs.

The opening trio of "Living Dead Beat", "Are You Dead Yet?", and "If You Want Peace... Prepare for War" are every bit as good as the heavier songs on the previous album and even could have made it a near flawless album if they had replaced the few weaker tracks.  Laiho and Wirman's trademark dueling solos are a tad less head-spinningly insane this time around, but their ear for hooks is as sharp as ever, with the title track and "If You Want Peace..." sporting two of the catchiest choruses the band will ever write.  And while riffs were never the band's strength (always instead shining via the aforementioned hooks, solos, and memorable melodies), I am to this day stunned that they managed to rip out a riff as fucking perfect as the pre-verse riff in "Living Dead Beat" after the intro.  Total fucking shame that it only shows up for a few bars here and there. 

It's the following two thirds of the album that shit the bed so mightily that it managed to sour those three belters and give this album the reputation as the first bad Bodom album.  "Punch Me I Bleed" is the token slow song that shows up on every fucking record because they're desperate to recreate the success of "Angels Don't Kill", and apart from the monolithic verse riff (that I realize now sounds an awful lot like Cannibal Corpse's "Scourge of Iron" seven years early) it's just as plodding and lame as its predecessor.  "In Your Face" also stands out as the song with the most wasted potential, since the initial feeling is one akin to that of "Sixpounder" with a shot of adrenaline, and the music itself borders on great from time to time, but... just holy shit this is the lyrical nadir.  Alexi was never a good lyricist, but they also never really mattered or took center stage.  Hell some of their best tracks include gems like "Well I'm an asshole and I really always will be" and "Kill, kill, kill, go fuck another one" so it's not like this is a new problem.  But "OH MY GOOOOD HERE'S A FIIIIGHT" and a repeated refrain of "I DON'T GIVE A FLYING FUCK MOTHERFUCKER" is just somehow so much stupider than anything he's barfed out before.  The rest of the album just flounders as the drunken Finns suddenly forgot how to write a song and everything just kinda flops around with lame chugs, weak leads, and no clear direction.  "Trashed, Lost and Strungout" is the lone good song in the back half, sounding like another lost Hate Crew jawn, but after four spectacular bed-wetters in a row it's a task bordering on herculean to get excited about it.

I have a theory on why the album falls apart so quickly after the first few tracks, though I admit it's purely speculation.  I feel like those three great songs were among the first written, and after a while Alexi realized that this new simplified direction is way the fuck easier to write than the complex pyrotechnics showcased on classics like "Kissing the Shadows" so he just stopped trying so hard.  The songs feel like they came together on their own and I suspect they probably did, because the level of effort involved is abysmal here.  Tracks 4 thru 9 sound like a stream of consciousness first drafts that were all in desperate need of tweaking and rewrites.  Like come on, "We're Not Gonna Fall" sounds like a filler track that plays during the character select screen in Dynasty Warriors.  There is no way "Next in Line" is the best he could do.  I know he was absolutely losing his grip on the first half of "high functioning alcoholic" at the time and it shows.  Even Janne Wirman's keyboard work takes a back seat for the majority of the album, which is a fucking crime considering how he was always the co-headliner in the band and arguably the most talented member to begin with.  He doesn't play background atmosphere, that's not what he does, he's a front and center melody carrier and solo wizard.  Putting him in the background to do twinkling bullshit is like signing Wayne Gretzky and making him play goalie.  They make his reduced role work on the title track and precisely nowhere else.

Are You Dead Yet? is a house of cards that scatters the minute a stiff breeze blows its way.  I wish with all of my heart that they could've kept up the level of quality showcased on the opening triad, because it's definitely different for them, but it's still excellent.  Let it never be said that I hate change on principle.  My main concern is whether or not the changes are good, and at first they absolutely are.  This album really signaled the beginning of the end for a band that was once completely unique, more or less inventing an entire microgenre wholesale while reigning at the top of the pack on a macro scale.  They would have a few minor rebounds here and there in the 2010s, but at the end of the day, Hate Crew Deathroll was a tantalizing peek at what Bodom could do if they streamlined their songwriting a bit, while Are You Dead Yet? is the depressing reality of what happens when they decide to go whole hog and stop giving a shit.


RATING: 44%

Burn Down Eden - Liberticidal

[note: insert title before posting]

I went through a brief phase back in 2013 or so where I was the biggest Battlecross fan on the planet for like six and a half minutes.  Around that time there was a minor groundswell of bands just like them that blended thrash with melodeath in a way that hadn't really been commercially successful since the heyday of The Haunted a decade prior, and they all suffered the exact same problem: They had a ton of energy and threw tons of riffs at you but precisely none of them would ever stick.  It's pure "in one ear and out the other" metal, and it got so bad that Battlecross is literally the only band like this that I can remember six years later (after typing that I checked the Similar Artists tab on MA and saw that I voted them as similar to Revocation, a band I made this exact point about last year and now I can't stop laughing at how correct I was).

Obviously I bring that up because Burn Down Eden is similar to the Battlecross type of metal in many respects, but it's not a 1:1 comparison.  The Americans tend to lean harder into the thrash side of the equation, while the Germans here have one foot and three toes planted on the melodeath side, and as such they tend to focus a bit more on hooks and lead lines than riffs themselves.  That may rob them of some meaty intensity, but it gives them a clear advantage in terms of memorability.

Liberticidal's bread and butter is a sort of The Black Dahlia Murder-esque high speed melodeath with technically impressive solos that don't do much to excite people who aren't automatically wowed by sweeping arpeggios.  I also hear a lot of hints of Wintersun in here in the lead guitar department (from the self titled era of course, his is quite free from the excessive bombast that cripples Jari with such alarming frequency), and I've always tended to like bands that take a lot of influence from Wintersun a hell of a lot more than Wintersun themselves (like Brymir and Aephanemer) so you'd think that'd be a good sign..  Just like with the Battlecross type bands, when this is on, it's breathtaking and exciting, but as soon as it's over it feels like you barely listened to anything at all.  The parts that stick out are usually thanks to sheer repetition.  That lead lick in "Grotesque Satisfaction" just goes on and on and on and I swear the song felt twice as long just because I heard that fucking "widdlywiddlyWEE" part a hundred times.

Honestly, their real crime is simply not doing much to keep the album exciting.  Nearly every track on Liberticidal runs for a similar length of time, and that's almost always a clue that the songs themselves are going to be workmanlike and samey.  This is no exception, though they're a lot busier than most songs on albums of this nature.  The sheer number of solos and flashy leads should turn this into a colorful dynamo but instead it all fades into this kind of Dime Store Children of Bodom mush and winds up being totally inconsequential.  Hell, I'm not even kidding when I say that the main riff of "Eternal Youth" is so similar to the one in "Dystopic Endzeit Panorama" that I genuinely thought it was just a bridge riff at first and had no idea the tracks changed.  With the heavy focus on melodies and lead guitar, you'd think that would naturally be Burn Down Eden's strength, but it's really not.  All of that stuff is surface flash, a quick woosh of fire that dazzles for a few seconds and fades just as quickly.  No, their real strength is in the sections where they just buckle down and riff out something really god damned mean while the drums start blasting away.  "Eternal Youth" and "Dammerung" are best for this and are easily the best tracks on the record.

I started writing this with a much higher opinion of the album than when I finished, which is pretty emblematic of the entire problem with this particular subset of metal in the first place.  On the surface, this is an impressive and ear catching, but after a few minutes fades you realize that your ear wasn't caught as much as it was swatted lightly.


RATING: 40%

Unmasked - Behind the Mask

I finished this review an hour ago and can't think of a title

I'm learning to sorta completely gloss over promos that I know will bore me to tears or will just be shitty without being fun to pick on, and so as a result I find myself pretty frequently just skipping over most of the melodeath that gets sent my way.  Something about Unmasked struck me as different though.  I don't know why, aesthetically this is 100% the kind of boring, riffless pedantry that makes me write off a vast majority of the genre as worthless nonsense, but it was the track lengths that caught my eye.  Behind the Mask features only five tracks, but it still runs for a full 40 minutes thanks to four of the tracks breaking the eight minute mark (oddly enough, they sequentially run for 8:10, 8:20, 8:30, and 8:40).  I felt like this quintet from Bonn had to have some interesting ideas if they were able to stretch their compositions for such a lengthy amount of time so consistently.  It's not easy to breach eight minutes when you're just doing the In Flames style of "Iron Maiden with growls" that melodeath so frequently devolves into.

Thirty seconds into the first track, I realized exactly what my mistake was and instantly knew how the rest of the album was going to play out.  If you're gonna take the Gothenburg style and make the songs really long, you need to be exceptionally skilled songwriters.  However, Unmasked doesn't play the Gothenburg style.  Instead, they take most of their influence from the school of Insomnium and Be'lakor, which is way easier to utilize in order to lazily fart out long songs.  I don't know how I didn't see this coming.  I covered Marianas Rest a few months ago and they operate on the exact same conceit so I really only have myself to blame for being caught off guard here. 

The reason Behind the Mask bores me so much is that these guys only really scratch the superficial surface of the style they're playing.  "Gaia" has some okay moments but the atmosphere is incredibly passive and unengaging.  "Home" is the lone average length song but it doesn't achieve that by being faster and more exciting, it's simply shorter and doesn't repeat as much.  There's some bouncing groove and rolling double bass here and there in "Drenched in Blood" and "No Regrets" but each section featuring a new and interesting idea is disappointingly brief and still never does much to break beyond the established tropes of the genre.  Insomnium is so revered not simply because they were pioneers, but because they continually break their own rules and push ideas to extremes.  Their tempos can vary quite a lot, and even though each album is very tonally consistent within itself, the atmosphere is incredibly pervasive and confident.  Unmasked here just kinda plays what's expected of them and waffles around with dry ideas that dozens of bands have beaten them to already.  I swear every section of every track sits within the same 10bpm window, never fully taking a risk and going for a more aggressive Be'lakor-esque section or a fully death/doom Swallow the Sun-esque dirge.  They merely flirt with such ideas here and there, never fully committing to anything, instead sheepishly looking across the bar at these much more interesting and attractive ideas before quickly looking back at their drinks whenever they try to engage.  Even the keyboards have like a total of sixty seconds where they do anything beyond playing swelling chords in the background and actually take the lead and carry a melody.  Why even bother?  It's basically just a backing track that never turns off.

Apart from a few riffs with a decent bouncing groove on the title track and "No Regrets", there's really nothing here that I can recommend.  This is a very unconfident and timid album, and it suffers from this seemingly crippling fear to do anything else with their ideas beyond dipping their toes in them and deciding that the temperature isn't right and retreating back into the pool house.  You can tell there's potential for a decent entry into this melancholic melodeath niche, but Unmasked aren't even close to reaching that point yet.  As of now, they're entirely skippable.


RATING: 31%

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.

Dying Embers - Where Shadeless Dwell Frozen

Fuckin' hell man

I've been saying for years that there's a difference between "melodic death metal" and "melodeath", even though I know it's a purely semantic distinction that doesn't really matter to anybody other than me and other likeminded nerds.  Just so we're on the same page, to me, "melodic death metal" is literally that, death metal with a lot of melody.  It retains the pummeling morbidity of its parent genre and blends the inherent intensity with a heaps of melodic sensibility (see: The Black Dahlia Murder, Arsis, Vehemence).  On the other hand, we have "melodeath", which is shorthand for that style that originated out of Sweden, sometimes called the "Gothenburg style" that basically amounts to "Iron Maiden with growls".  The actual death metal component of this subsect is relegated almost entirely to harsh vocals and occasionally high speed drumming, while the focus is much more honed in on overt guitar melodies and mid paced riffs, oftentimes featuring clean vocals (see In Flames, Scar Symmetry, Soilwork).

But throughout all of the years I've been doing this, I've always avoided the temptation to further split this dichotomy into a third category, mostly because up until now it always felt more pejorative than descriptive.  But here we are, with the debut Dying Embers album, and I just can't deny it any longer; "melodeath" has indeed fully given way to a third style - "mellowdeath".

To call this "mellowdeath" is a bit of a misnomer, but not for the inflammatory first half of the descriptor.  Where Shadeless Dwell Frozen is indeed a very mellow and easy listen, but implying that death metal exists anywhere near the galactic quadrant where this is written is horribly misleading.  I would honestly argue that this has more in common with radio friendly alternative rock than anything approaching metal, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing in a vacuum, but it certainly manifests as a bad thing when the songs are as fucking lame and unengaging as they are here.  Dying Embers is the cosmic endgame of the sound that In Flames really started pushing for over the last decade starting with A Sense of Purpose.  This is essentially a lost In Flames album where they just stopped pandering to their old fans for 45 seconds per song and Anders dropped the harsh vocals entirely.  Where Shadeless Dwell Frozen take the template they've been toying with for years now and just go full out with it, completely excising almost every trace of metal as a whole and replacing it with the toothless non-riffs under the choruses and spread them liberally throughout the entire runtime.

There was a point during "Beyond the Crimson Haze" where I actually thought to myself "This sounds like Alter Bridge", and I haven't even heard a single note of Alter Bridge's music since they had that one minor hit on rock radio back in like 2004 or whatever.  Even so, I was sure that this is what it sounded like.  Harmless rock riffs with a thin veneer of heaviness that completely dissipates when you examine it for more than a few seconds.  They're obviously not under any real delusions that they're any sort of metal band, but Dying Embers hasn't seemed to get the memo yet.  The whole experience here is very... well, mellow.  I can point out all of the moderately exciting parts, it's not hard.  You've got the opening 30 seconds to "Pursue the Light" and an even shorter section midway through "Dead to the World", and then that's it.  You've got like 40 total seconds of anything approaching adrenaline throughout the entire runtime, it's a fuckin' joke. I wish it was possible to go into more detail, but it isn't.  Dying Embers has produced an almost wholly encompassing non-album, presenting ten tracks that all sound more or less exactly the same, all sounding like they took as long to write as they do to finish reading this review.  It's pure plug-and-play workmanship with no real passion or excitement or even fucking effort.  It's just bad, safe, unengaging, weak, and so far beyond "not worth listening to" that I question if it even lands on "worth recording".

As if it couldn't get any more insultingly pointless, I've avoided talking about the man behind the band this entire time, but I can't really tiptoe around it much longer.  Dying Embers is the solo project of Jürgen Schurz. You don't know that name and neither do I, but he's the frontman of another presumably pointless melodeath band, Unhallowed. Before even learning that tidbit of info, I could have told you this was a solo project using my own two ears alone based on the sheer amateur incompetence. Dying Embers is very clearly orchestrated by one guy because the guitars are at the very least played with a level of competence that showcases some knowledge of the instrument, but every other aspect of the band falls so flat that it's obvious it's just one guy floundering through a bunch of elements he's no good at. The drums are completely flat and uninteresting, the bass doesn't play one note outside of the root note of whatever powerchord the guitar is playing at any given time, and the vocals are... wew lad the vocals are fucking terrible. It's bad enough that the instruments themselves are completely devoid of creativity, but the vocals manage to go a step further by completely lacking in talent and even then whiffing on execution. He only toys with harsh vocals for a total of like fifteen words, but that wouldn't be a problem if he was actually a decent singer, but boy is he not a good singer either. I say with zero hyperbole that he sounds like he's just kinda talking and shifting his pitch every once in a while. It's deep-voiced mumbling trying to masquerade as epic but failing to evoke any sort of emotion beyond all encompassing boredom. There's a section in "Praise the Signs" where he starts with a weak growl and halfway through just... stops. It genuinely doesn't sound intentional at all, it sounds like he intended to growl the whole section but his throat started hurting so he just kinda gave up halfway through and starting talking slowly again. It would be funny if it wasn't so fucking bland and dull that I didn't somehow completely miss that part on the first four spins simply because I had totally checked out and was more interested in fantasizing my own death than listening to this album.

So I'm finally giving up and acknowledging mellowdeath's existence as a codified genre, and the band that made me realize that yes indeed, people who weren't already moderately well known did indeed consciously choose to take influence from the awful waning years of In Flames's career was Dying Embers, a group consisting of one guy who I am positive wasn't even awake during all of the recording process. As soon as I understood that mellowdeath was real, I was forced to immediately divide it again into another subbier-than-subgenre into "bedroom mellowdeath", because this has all the hallmarks of awful bedroom black metal. Completely amateur, poorly written, unexciting, and vocals that sound like he's trying not to wake up his neighbors/parents. There is not one second of worthwhile music on Where Shadeless Dwell Frozen, and I recommend it to nobody. But that's okay, nobody is going to listen to this anyway.


RATING: 7%

Children of Bodom - I Worship Chaos

JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP

I've had a tumultuous relationship with Bodom over the years.  They're another band I've wound up consistently covering throughout my reviewing career without really doing so intentionally, mostly because they were just simply one of my favorite bands in high school, and due to my listening habits at the time, I binged so much of their material from 03-07 that I could probably play every song on every instrument from memory at this point, and I have fat sausage fingers and have never even seen a drumset in real life.  We all know how magical they were back when they were basically just Nightwish on fast forward with a vocalist who had no idea how to sing/scream/breathe and the worst lyrics ever written, floating by almost entirely on insane shredding and unmatched charisma.  We all know how bad they were when they dropped the melodic power metalisms more and more and started just becoming bland ass melodeath with occasional keys and nutso soloing.  We all know everything about them at this point, they're one of the more popular metal bands in the mainstream and anybody with the slightest awareness of where metal is currently knows who they are and what they're about.  So how are they faring nowadays after the surprisingly decent Halo of Blood in 2013?

Ehhhhh.

I Worship Chaos is basically just a slightly better counterpart to the totally irrelevant Relentless Reckless Forever, just with some much needed aggression that that release was sorely lacking.  Halo of Blood was a distinct and obvious throwback to their more melodic beginnings, acting as something of a hypothetical midpoint between Follow the Reaper (one of my all time favorite albums, if you recall) and Hate Crew Deathroll.  I Worship Chaos finds itself positioned one black key further down the piano of their release history, nestled neatly between Hate Crew and Are You Dead Yet?, being a more heavily melodeath influenced album than the former but still retaining some of the overt melodicism that the latter had excised in 2005. 

Now, I don't necessarily hate either of those two albums.  I think Hate Crew is great and AYDY at the very least starts strong with three fun songs before becoming a boring slog, and I think this one's thematic counterparts translate basically 1:1 in terms of quality.  It's got three great songs hidden among a bunch of inconsequential, effortless nonsense.  "I Hurt" is a fine opener, with some nice hooks and a damn catchy chorus riff (that "I AM DOMINANT" part is one of the most entertaining things they've done in ages), "Horns" is mad aggressive and sounds straight out of 2003, replete with some mindbending fret/keyboard acrobatics, and the title track is one of the best songs they've written in years, again sounding like something that would've been right at home on Hate Crew with how pummeling and insane it is.  The keys remain prominent and the hooks are strong as hell, even the chorus is awesome, sounding like it was tailor made for the live arena.  I can't stress enough that this is exactly what Bodom is so fucking good at.  Clearly their power metal based beginnings are long gone, but when they fully embrace the melodeath style and filter it through the songwriting lens of a rabid wolf who happens to have human fingers and be really good at guitar, they can craft some seriously excellent stuff.

The problem arises with the rest of the album, as it flip flops between those god awful slow songs they insist on shoehorning into every album ever since "Angels Don't Kill" somehow became a fan favorite (see: "Prayer for the Afflicted" and "All for Nothing") and near-totally irrelevant white noise that sounds like it was written in an afternoon ("Hold Your Tongue", "Morrigan", "Suicide Bomber", etc).  "All for Nothing" stands out in the worst way, potentially being the most teeth-grittingly terrible song the band ever released, attempting to be some sort of unholy power ballad that awkwardly transitions between quiet piano parts with Alexi just whispering like Jonathon Davis since he can't sing and bland plodding non-riffs that go nowhere at all.  Not even the wind-in-your-hair epic dueling solos that carry the song out can save this trainwreck, it's such an awful attempt at saccharine emotion that falls so flat that it's practically invisible when viewed from the side.  I hate this song and I hate anybody who likes it.  Even the otherwise solid "Widdershins" tends to be forgotten by me simply because it follows this disaster and I just want the fucking album to end already.

There aren't a whole lot of stylistic differences between the good songs and the lame ones, so it really just showcases the difference in level of songwriting.  "I Worship Chaos" is a total mess of unconnected ideas but they're all good ideas so it winds up being a somewhat anarchic whizbang avalanche of raditude, while "Suicide Bomber" is singularly focused in being keyboard heavy melodeath but manages to limp through the entire runtime without one single memorable riff or melody.  Bodom is showing themselves to be an odd enigma who routinely excels when they don't really know what they're doing.  The more they focus on crafting songs around a unified whole, the more they find themselves following the rules and releasing inconsequential boredom.  When they just sorta say "fuck it" and go balls to the wall with no restraint or clear direction, they wind up gutting out memorable confetti farts of glitter and shrapnel.  That's what made the first four albums so special, they were just terminal alcoholics who were really good at their instruments so they flailed around aimlessly and wound up wrecking everything in their path with flair and aplomb. 

The problem with Bodom nowadays isn't that they used to be great, because that would be unfair to hold I Worship Chaos in lower regard simply because Hatebreeder is so much better.  The problem is that an album like this showcases the difference between a good example of the style (specifically Hate Crew Deathroll since it adds so much heaviness to their original sound and has always sort of been the template for everything afterwards) and a mediocre example of the style (this album and most of the ones preceding it, with the exception of its immediate predecessor, which still holds up).  The elements are there, but the final product is just... wrong somehow.  I don't want to say it's undercooked, because they've definitely been around long enough to know what they're doing and have a solid idea of what they want to do, and I don't want to say it's overcooked because it's somehow still unrefined and it doesn't suffer from overproduction or too many ideas or anything.  It's a very "medium" album.  It's not rare and it's certainly not well done.


RATING: 48%

Euphoreon - Ends of the Earth

Thinking of titles gets harder by the day

All it took to interest me in Euphoreon was an offhand comment about how they sound like "Wintersun if they were actually good".  My boundless hatred for Wintersun has become something of a claim to fame for myself, but I've always vocally given credit where credit is due, and readily admit that they have a few incredible songs and could genuinely be an amazing band if they consistently played to their strengths instead of bloated everything to death.  If anybody else is touted to be exactly what it is I truly want out of my arch nemesis, then of course I'm willing to give them a shot. 

Euphoreon... well isn't quite that, because their influences are definitely more varied than that one particular Finnish institution, but they're solid regardless.

Ends of the Earth doesn't really break any new ground but they play this distinctly European style of melodeath pretty well.  Instead of really aping Wintersun's sound like I keep reading about, more accurately they sound like something of a hybrid between the less insane non-Bodom Bodom clones that started gaining traction shortly after they rose to prominence (like Skyfire and Kalmah) and the more melancholic and riffless style of melodeath that Insomnium helped popularize.  I guess you could argue that this really isn't so different from something like Frosttide but the first thing I thought when giving this album its first spin was how much it made me want to listen to Be'lakor.  I haven't seen them namedropped much around the band, but most of these melodies that carry the songs are straight out of Stone's Reach or Of Breath and Bone.  Hell, "Euphoria" almost uses the exact same main theme as "Abeyance" note-for-note.  That style of melody where the guitar quickly palm mutes an open high string and intermittently baps a few notes up the neck is abused to no end here.  The addition of epic keys and choirs is the one thing that truly sets Euphoreon apart from the style they're so firmly rooted in, and it's likely why they're more immediately compared to what seems to actually be their secondary influence.  Well, that and the vocals, since the Insomnium style has a tendency to feature incredibly talented growlers with destructively deep registers that would absolutely murder in more brutal styles, whereas this duo aims for a more ghoulish brittleness ala Kalmah's first three albums. 

The songs themselves here are, all told, fairly simple despite the average length falling a few seconds short of seven minutes, but they do a good job of not getting boring, exactly.  It's sort of odd, because despite not being boring, they aren't quite engaging all the time either.  There are a few highlights, sure, but "Euphoria" kicks off the album on a fairly humdrum note, and I don't think I've ever actually noticed the point where "Cravenness" gives way to "Oblivion".  Despite that, the album tends to get better as it goes along and then starts wearing on you as it begins to wrap up, since there isn't a whole lot of variation between the tracks and the idea of mid-paced riffless melodeath with good melodies festooned in booming keys can only work for so long before you just start to tune it all out.  So naturally, Ends of the Earth hits its stride between the second and fourth tracks before becoming a bit too samey to stay consistently engaged, despite a few standout moments in the back half in "Cravenness" and "The Grand Becoming".  The title track is one of the few that truly does sound like Wintersun to me, with the heightened aggression calling to mind a more exciting version of  Jari's least-bad-but-still-bad song, "Battle Against Time".  "Mirrors" in particular really stands out for the truly astounding lead melody that never really stops careening around the track but never gets old either.  I could probably listen to it forever.

The problem is that, on my second spin through the album, that melody finally clicked in my head and I realized I have been listening to it forever.  It is, almost note-for-note, the "chorus" melody in Joe Satriani's "Crushing Day".  I never really talk about him because he's rarely relevant to what I typically write about, but I'm a big fan of Satch.  Surfing with the Alien is one of the all time greatest guitar albums ever penned, and his penchant for ear catching melodies in between his signature shredding is exactly why Satch stands so far above most of his contemporaries to me.  On one hand this means Euphoreon picked a damn good melody to nick, but on the other hand that marks two melodies (along with the aforementioned Be'lakor "homage" in the opener) that I fairly quickly noticed were borrowed with suspicious similarity.  Obviously it could just be coincidence, but now every time I listen to this I'm doing so with heightened scrutiny, seeing if there's anything else I might've missed, and everything I don't immediately recognize is given something of a side-eye glance because now I can't help but wonder if some other, better artist already wrote it.  Y'all better hope you don't get too popular now, because Uncle Joe has proven himself to be the litigious type if he feels he's been ripped off, just ask Coldplay how borrowing the melody to "Flying in a Blue Dream" worked out for them.

Overall though it's not really the biggest deal, and it'd be massively hypocritical for a Gamma Ray fan like myself to write off a band for getting a bit too ballsy with riff/melody borrowing.  Ends of the Earth is a quite solid melodeath album with a grandiose atmosphere.  There's pretty much no chance it'll find itself on several year end best-of lists in 2018, but I certainly do like their approach and will surely keep listening to this as the year goes on.  If this appeals to Wintersun fans I certainly would recommend Euphoreon to them, because the less people listening to Wintersun, the better.


RATING: 72%