Review Summary: It is smooth sailing for DevilDriver on their sixth studio album
Winter Kills is a highly polarizing record. On one hand it is a clear improvement over the inconsistent
Beast whilst also serving as a delightfully destructive force, yet on the other it seems to lack that special spark that put records like
The Fury of Our Maker’s Hand and
The Last Kind Words over the top.
Winter Kills is still distinctively DevilDriver – John Boecklin (drums), Mike Spreitzer (guitar), Jeff Kendrick (guitar) and new boy Chris Towning (bass) wreak controlled chaos like DevilDriver always have, while Dez Fafara is very much his old self: you either love or hate his cookie monster vocals and blue-collar lyrics. Yet, the album isn’t as spellbinding as the two aforementioned ones were. It continues on the darker path set by
Beast and the only song coming close to more playful DevilDriver cuts like "Another Night In London," "Back With a Vengeance" and "Damning The Heavens" is "Tripping Over Tombstones," which can effectively be described as a soundtrack to a Wild West bar fight. Otherwise this is DevilDriver’s second-darkest album to date while also being much more coherent songwriting-wise than its predecessor. However, although
Winter Kills is another solid addition to DevilDriver’s catalog that features only one weak link (the debut), I can’t call it the band’s crowning achievement to date.
Interestingly, when looking at
Winter Kills as a separate entity, you could argue that it is exactly the kind of album Dez Fafara has been trying to make for a decade now: it’s heavy, relentless, coherent and simply takes no prisoners. A new-found sense of urgency can also be felt, and although Mr. Fafara says basically the same things every time a new DevilDriver album is being released,
Winter Kills does indeed deliver on the promises of heavy grooves, massive hooks and a biting guitar tone. Yet, despite being a thoroughly enjoyable piece of metal, it doesn’t have the irresistible charisma of
The Fury of Our Maker’s Hand and
The Last Kind Words. Ultimately it comes down to pretension. It would be unfair to say that DevilDriver have lost their bite when
Winter Kills sounds this vicious, but in a way that ultimate drive which newcomers have to prove doubters wrong and put their name up there is less visible here than it was, for example, on
The Last Kind Words, probably because DevilDriver have already firmly established themselves as one of the bigger metal bands out there today.
Winter Kills doesn’t feature a DevilDriver on autopilot, far from it, but the whole attitude found on the record seems to be of a more content, assured band. While an album like
The Fury of Our Maker’s Hand had real highs and lows, resulting in a tense roller coaster that left the listener craving for more,
Winter Kills features a rather steady battering-ram sound throughout, which is appeasing, but doesn’t necessarily sentence the replay button to death. The new tracks are bound to be solid additions to DevilDriver’s live-sets, but in all honesty the only cuts capable of absolutely blowing the listener away, like "End of The Line," "Clouds Over California" and "The Axe Shall Fall" among others have in the past, are "The Appetite" and the band’s version of Awolnation’s "Sail," which is one of those rare covers that surpasses the original. That’s not to say
Winter Kills isn’t a worthy buy, but it isn’t a second DevilDriver revolution (I dare proclaim that
The Last Kind Words was the first) – it’s merely a natural progression from where they last left off.
It’s difficult to say anything unconditionally conclusive about
Winter Kills, because it lends itself to varying degrees of acclaim depending on the angle you look at it from. Some will find it to be DevilDriver’s most consistent, vicious, and thus most triumphant release; others will critique the lack of unpredictability and true single material (it must be said though, that in "Ruthless" DevilDriver managed to pick the worst possible candidate for the single, which is quite a feat when looking at all the better options that were available for them). That’s what makes
Winter Kills so polarizing: it’s bound to elicit very different emotions and opinions in people who have heard some or all of DevilDriver’s earlier work as well. What can not be contested though, is the band’s growth in maturity, as they have really come into their own as a group.
Winter Kills may be just another DevilDriver album, but today that means it is bound to deliver some wicked tunes. While I’m starting to lose faith that the band will ever make an album as infectious and timeless as
The Last Kind Words again, I’m comforted by the knowledge that their new material isn’t too far behind in terms of quality. Whenever these guys come to town, I advise every metal fan to go to their gig. DevilDriver put on one hell of a show, and
Winter Kills, while not groundbreaking nor particularly surprising, features material well worth blasting from your speakers or seeing live.
