Review Summary: When pretensions are put aside this album can be a fun romp for 30-plus minutes; however, it's the lasting power of Savage Seas that gets called into question when the tracks bleed into each other after just one listen.
There are many times that I have reflected on what music means to me. I always come back with a myriad of reasons, but one thing that I sometimes lose sight of is the reason that got me so interested in the first place: music was just
fun. Music was an escape from reality, a passionate reminder that life wasn’t always by the numbers and boring. Metalcore was a genre that introduced me to extreme music that lacked pretension in its straight-forward presentation. The formula can tire a listener out, leaving many feeling that they have heard the same song ten or eleven times, but Australian metalcore act Feed Her To The Sharks have found a few cheap tricks up their collective sleeve by employing a strong backbone of heaviness and throwing in anthemic, catchy choruses. Simply put,
Savage Seas is as fun as the listener will allow it to be; the band is certainly unabashedly utilizing breakdowns in each and every song on the album. Feed Her To The Sharks are obviously not looking to reinvent the wheel here, only to fine-tune a formula that has been etched in stone ever since bands like As I Lay Dying have hit the scene. It certainly doesn’t hurt that vocalist Andrew Vanderzalm has an incredible range, with bellowing lows and putrid highs reminiscent of I Killed the Prom Queen. There is certainly something to be said of a band such as this, as they have improved the mechanics of a melodic metalcore band while avoiding a few of the pitfalls that their contemporaries repeatedly fall into.
Savage Seas does follow certain genre guidelines, but there are thankfully a few missteps that are completely avoided. There are quite a few bands that have jumped on the bandwagon of relying heavily on the usage of electronics in the genre, and Feed Her To The Sharks is the only band in the genre that seems to understand the value of less is more. Guitarist/synth player Kim Choo inserts just enough electronic influences to subtly alter the path of some songs, creating a better aural atmosphere for the listener without beating them over the head with it and destroying the heavy sound completely. The perfect example of this is “Memory of You”, as the synth sound effects peek around the muscular guitar riffs and breakdowns while never sacrificing the main sound of the band. The soaring clean vocals of this song round out the best of the album, and truly provide a template of what listeners should expect. The chaotic and energetic intro to “*** Melbourne” provide another highlight, but the main detriment is the monotony that one can run into with
Savage Seas. There aren’t many overt mistakes made by the quintet, but when “Shore of Loneliness” bleeds into “Buried Alive” seamlessly, it ends up sounding a little too perfect. The transition there starts a snowball effect which ends up with the listener having trouble differentiating between songs towards the end of the album. Closer “Death’s Design” breaks the cycle with the clean guitar intro and provides the album with the most fluid combination of clean and harsh vocals, but for the entirety of
Savage Seas it ends up being too little, too late.
This is an album that many people will enjoy for what it is, which happens to be an energetic metalcore album that does barely enough to differentiate itself from the pack while keeping the genre’s staples. However, if you didn’t enjoy breakdown-laden music before, chances are this isn't the band for you. This fact is precisely why
Savage Seas can be enjoyable though; Feed Her To The Sharks have crafted an album that they obviously had a ball creating, which makes it much more fun to listen to. There just isn't much more to it; no amount of listens will bring to light subtle textures or atmospheric touches that you didn't hear the first time around. When pretensions are put aside this album can be a fun romp for 30-plus minutes; however, it's the lasting power of
Savage Seas that gets called into question when the tracks bleed into each other after just one listen.
