Review Summary: Capitalizing on the success of In Waves, Vengeance Falls finds Trivium attempting to bring in more mainstream fans by making their songs catchy, but falter on everything else.
I'm just going to say it right out of the gate. Vengeance Falls is not another Shogun. Odds are Trivium will never create an album quite like that again. However, if you enjoyed In Waves, you will probably end up liking this. While it never reaches the heights of it, it does offer some catchy songs that willll have you jamming along with it in minutes.
Vengeance Falls feels like a direct continuation of In Waves's sound. The guitar's have the same sound and tone, the
drums keep pace as always, and Matt Heafy is content on singing nearly all of his lines (screams make a return, though in a severly reduced format). But, this makes sense. In Waves saw the highest sales Trivium had seen, so why
would they not continue with that sound?
Unfortunetly, this album falters a lot. The biggest complaint would be David Draimam. His influence on this album is undeniable. On some songs like "Brave This Storm" and "To Believe" bear to close of a resemblance to Disturbed. one of them would appear out of place on one of their albums. It's rather disappointing. A great example of this would be the song "Villainy Thrives." The vocal delivery after the first chorus is classic David. It just doesn't fit well with Trivium. They try to make it their own by adding some screams, but it just feels contrived.
While they still have some enjoyable riffs, there's still an over reliance on chugging, like on the opener "Brave This Storm," with has a prolonged intro that fails to pick up any excitement. The track itself is also rather unremarkable besides the chorus, which is quite fun. And that statement goes for the album as a whole as well. They have managed to create some great hooks and sing along moments, but the rest falters and never really picks up. However, even after all these faults, Trivium still have managed to imrpove upon their lyrical ability. No longer are they repeating the chorus over and over again, with only one or two versus. The songs feel fully fleshed out which improves the re-playability dramatically.
I truly did enjoy this album. It served as a nice, fun listen. However, I feel it's future will just end up being background music. With no real stand out tracks, I wouldn't recommend the album to anyone who didn't enjoy In Waves. I would actually recommend going and listening to that record again instead of picking this up. It's not bad, but it's not good either.
Album stream: http://trivium.org/vengeancefalls/
