New Releases 2009, Part VIII
Featured Review: Our Lady Peace
Burn Burn
Our Lady Peace is one of those bands that has a definitive "sell-out" point, regardless of whether you think that's a bad thing or not. In their case, it was the album Gravity, released way back in 2002. Eschewing the more thoughtful, angsty aspects of their earlier music in favor of stadium-ready hooks and soaring choruses, it simultaneously earned them a legion of new fans and alienated many older listeners. As is so often the case, I was largely unaffected, enjoying Gravity as much as I had their earlier works. 2005's follow-up, Healthy in Paranoid Times is one of my favorites of theirs, so I had reasonably high expectations for their new record.
Album opener "All You Did Was Save My Life" is almost immediately familiar. And I don't mean that in a general sense-I mean it reminded me very strongly of both first singles from the last two albums, "Where Are You?" and "Somewhere Out There". It is a similarly repetitive, catchy pop-rock song with a chorus ready for big stadium sing-alongs. It's pleasant enough, and it certainly is infectious, but it just doesn't quite have the oomph to make it terribly memorable. "Dreamland", with its more subdued, slow-paced opening actually ends up being one of the more memorable songs on the album. It does OLP's trademark mixture of hopeful/sad, and does so in a way that's both familiar and original. In contrast, "Monkey Brains" has a lot more energy, opening with a great riff and a stomping rhythm. It's another OLP staple: the angsty song, but with a twist. At the halfway point, the angst falls away, leaving strings and an acoustic guitar, which goes on for a little bit before one last hurrah with the distorted guitar and heavy bass. I like several parts of this song, but they feel a bit disjointed, never quite gelling into something really memorable.
"The End Is Where We Begin" is a nice triumphalist OLP song, seemingly tailor-made for mainstream rock radio. That means two things: it's simple, catchy and inoffensive, and it's also very forgettable. "Escape Artist" starts out with a very Modest Mouse-like thumping beat, backed by a tambourine, leaving me wondering what this foretells. Indeed, the entire song almost sounds like an OLP cover of a Modest Mouse song, minus the latter's spastic energy and esoteric flair. It just doesn't seem to go anywhere. Not for the first time on this album, the elements that are promising never seem to materialize into anything memorable. "Refuge" builds slowly and steadily toward... well, nothing really. The pace stays pretty steady, and the layers come and go, but don't seem to really do much but wander by. I don't know that I've ever been so impatient with an OLP song.
"Never Get Over You" is one of their slower ballads, with a sorrowful guitar line and Raine's pained singing. But, once again, it seems to try too hard to be a lighters-in-the-air stadium croon-along rather than really open up with genuine emotion. It is pleasant in its own way, but is a pale shadow of some of their other songs in this vein. "White Flags" has us back at the mildly fast-paced rock-out. Between its struggling-to-stay-in-tune guitar solo and repetitive lyrics, this song veers away from "tepid, but enjoyable" into "please skip this song". "Signs of Life" is quieter, opening with an acoustic guitar and lines about loneliness. It goes downhill when he busts out the la las, and then gets stuck in the doldrums of a monotonous rhythm and not much musical activity. Still, it's one of the more memorable songs on here. Closer "Paper Moon" is a little funky, alternating between nod-along bridges and more upbeat, louder choruses. The guitar becomes more prominent as the song goes on, building to a nice dropoff into a quiet last minute. It may not be the best OLP song, but it's a comparatively strong closer to a weak album.
Burn Burn represents all of the weaknesses demonstrated by OLP distilled into one album. By completely over-emphasizing their stadium-rock tendencies, they've left behind a sense of intimate anger and struggle that made their music so compelling. Part of this process of polishing also whittled away their lyrical quality, leaving behind repetitive, stunted, unimaginative stanzas where once there were much more creative songs. Everything on here feels like a OLP and/or radio-rock cliché, with virtually nothing to distinguish it. It's not bad, it's innocuous. In many ways, that's worse, especially coming from a band you like. I've listened to it many times over the past months, and still have trouble recalling individual songs. Easily their weakest work.
Grade: 5
Recommended Tracks: "Dreamland"; "Signs of Life"; "Paper Moon"
In the Black by Kittie
I admit to being morbidly curious about this, last having paid attention to Kittie back in high school during the nu-metal boom. What we have here is, unfortunately, rather forgettable. Despite the injection of some vague crossover thrash influence, it remains pretty generic nu-metal. It’s not really bad, so much as it is thoroughly uninteresting. The songs vary little, with similar tempos, virtually the same drum line, and unremarkable guitars. This results in something very flat, and I lost my interest after a couple of songs. If they’d gone more in the direction of their more thrash/black metal-tinged tracks (“Forgive & Forget”) then it might’ve been better.
Grade: 5
Recommended Tracks: "My Plague"; "Forgive & Forget"; "Whiskey Love Song"
Solemn, Sacred, Severe by Griftegård
Doom had quite a showing in 2009, and Griftegård is one of those showcasing a more traditionalist form of the genre, following closely in the path trod by early pioneers that first moved it out of Black Sabbath's shadow. Slow, plodding rhythms provide a thoughtful backdrop for thick, distorted riffs and minor-key melodies. The vocals are also more tradionalists, eschewing modern doom's tendency for guttural growls, sticking to the clean singing of older bands. The songs are long, winding, and contemplative, in no hurry to get to the point. The lyrics are as mournful and bitter as the music is slow and oppressive, singing about disillusion with Christianity and existential nihilism. It's hardly cheery, and it's best digested slowly, and in one full listen. If you like old-school doom, or if you just like your metal slow and bitter, then this is right up your alley.
Grade: 7.5
Recommended Tracks: "I Refuse These Ashes"; "Drunk With Wormwood"; "The Mire"
No Tolerance for Imperfection by Man Must Die
I've heard Glasgow is a tough place, so it should come as no surprise that Man Must Die sounds like they would beat the shit out of the nearest person. Now, when I think of what deathcore should sound like, this is it: technical guitar work and menacing melody from the death metal side, mixed with the stoccato rhythms, lyrical self-righteousness and angry-dog-bark vocals from the hardcore side. In fact, angry is just a good all-around term for No Tolerance for Imperfection, from the sheer aural brutality to the screaming about societal depravity and shallowness ("It's sickening the depths we will sink to for money"), or just pent-up rage ("You will never know what you have put me through / The time has come for me to fuckin' kill you!"). Great stuff for when you're sick of society and wish you could scream your hate from a rooftop.
Grade: 7.5
Recommended Tracks: "Gainsayer"; "Kill It Skin It Wear It"; "Reflections From Within"
Altered States of Consciousness by Fractal Gates
The French seem to be moving strongly into the realm of prog-minded death metal. Fractal Gates can't really measure up to the towering example set by Gojira, but that's nothing to really hold against them. Altered States of Consciousness is a very uneven record. Some of the songs have some great riffs and nod-along groove, while others languish in aimless sonic wandering. Many of the songs themselves are uneven, with very memorable moments separated by forgettable clichés and stitched together with little rhyme or reason. While some may attribute this to being "progressive", I think it simply means they need to polish their songwriting skills. There's a lot of promise here, but they need to tighten up their sound and streamline their songs a bit before it'll spend much time in my rotation.
Grade: 6
Recommended Tracks: "Gates to Nebula"; "Illusional Dementia"; "The Eclipse"
Breathing the Fire by Skeletonwitch
This band made something of a name for themselves with their last record, Beyond the Permafrost-perhaps because it was a bit of the tip of the iceberg when it came to the thrash resurgence. The band isn't straight-ahead thrash, incorporating a fair amount of black metal influence, particularly in their harsh, raspy vocals. Breathing the Fire isn't a radical departure, or much of a departure at all, still brandishing that hard-hitting blackened thrash attack that made them so endearing. The record's production is a bit better-not too clean like a lot of modern metal, not artificially dirty like so much black metal-letting the instruments stand out clearly and still feel organic. Their fast-paced songs are as pithy as they are thrashy, generally kept to fewer than three minutes in length. That's just enough to get into the groove and bang your head, but not so long that your attention begins to wander. It feels more focused than their last effort, going for the jugular with fast-paced riffs and keeping things simple. Excellent, and more memorable than their last.
Grade: 8
Recommended Tracks: "Stand, Fight and Die"; "Crushed Beyond Dust"; "Gorge Upon My Soul"
Evil Iron Kingdom by Spectral
From the cheesy, epic intro track, you'd expect this to be some sort of grandiose symphonic black metal band. Well, at least you're heading in the right direction. Spectral's music certainly could be classified black metal, but in perhaps somewhat typical German fashion they incorporate quite a lot of thrash influence. It's got some of black metal's cold raspiness, but the bulk of it is nice meaty riffs, blastbeats, and lots of headbanging. Lyrically, it's got the pagan/Viking obsession that a great many black metal bands have, putting it on similar ground to, say, Obscurity (hey, another German band!). So, if you see it tagged Viking metal, don't go expecting Windir-style black metal. It can be a little repetitive at times, particularly when they're leaning more in the stereotypical black metal direction with machine-gun blasts of drums and guitars. But, when they're in thrash mode, their riffs and melodies come together to make some great songs.
Grade: 8
Recommended Tracks: "Evil Iron Kingdom"; "Axecutioner" (how's that for a METAL songtitle?); "Age of Eternal Victory"