Review Summary: Playing it as safe as possible, with possessions to offer passing angst and fans a lot to anticipate.
It’s markedly not at all difficult to press out something called
Retribution mid-September, frolic over the internet about how amazingly unwavering it sounds, and how it effortlessly restructures earlier material into bigger and better things; Shadows Fall have been doing such things for a long time now. Last time Redemption could easily have become their 2007 title; Revenge could be the next if keeping Rs is becoming some sort of penchant. But by this point, the capacity of human intelligence has concluded that they’ve been essentially restaging 2002’s (pretentiously entitled)
The Art of Balance fluently for the past seven years. That’s three fitting puzzle pieces and a bag of mixed results. This fourth piece of the puzzle has the band once again making tentative speculations on where to go, fabricating a variety of somewhat formulaic thrash and progressive inclinations not too dissimilar to the partials of 2007’s
Threads of Life; only here that same formula delivers some expected supplementaries in the success division.
The acoustic-intro cliché (hereby setting this piece in motion) has been lucratively circumvented by Shadows Fall, but well tried and tested by many of their fellow genre contemporaries with hardly an impressionable result; unfortunately the outcome here for
“The Path to Imminent Ruin” is not unlike those related shortfalls and attempts to undercoat the anxious listener with a wash of minor chords and dissonant swells. As much as they may like you to think that this and the rest have some form of conceptuality, they in fact have very little. But where it fails in both its stale conception and ambivalent lyricism (no thanks to Brian Fair’s wondrous take on society via barking vocal boredom throughout), it makes up through a more decisive musicality. Such passages -- where Jonathan Donias’ acrobatic journeys over the guitar unite with Matt Bachand’s rhythm lattice -- either fall under a song’s introduction, or possibly its interlude, (see
“Embrace Annihilation”,
“Still I Rise”, and
“Dead and Gone” as amiable approach points). Thereought to be more of this type of structuring and amalgamation from elsewhere, but they’re not necessarily easy to unearth.
“War” and
“A Public Execution” are unambiguous thrash rudiments that while sighing off any kind of sonic continuity, both hearken back to
Slayer’s 80s recipes but with defined lucidity in mind. Other unsaid instances may defer some of the uncertain tension for keen fans, but in essence this is as safe as a playhouse; probably the continuing baby steps to future progressive tendencies; and finally yet another compounding insight into possible prospects.
