Welcome to another ¨Defiance¨-review, I listen it through carefully and this is the result of it and I hope that it will give some guidance to those who wants to search for new styles of thrash-metal or music in general. So here we go, the Bay-Area thrashers of ¨Defiance¨ continues to deliver samshing riffings and drumming but the is just one problem here, if you want to know more then you have to read the whole thing. This album is called ¨Beyond Recognition¨, this album didn't get much attention when all other sorts of music and albums came to birth, the line-up for this album is:
Steve Esquivel - vocals
Doug Harrington - guitars
Jim Adams - guitars
Mike Kaufmann - bass
Matt Vander Ende - drums
This album was not a great one in my opinion, the album has some really have guitar riffs and heavy drumbeats but it is the song-structures which is the whole problem. I found many songs to be slow, uncatchy and very staccato, there was no good flow in the songs and that made them all to sound boring. The songs starts pretty good but then the songs looses their edge, the songs gets slower and the songs feels kind of hacky and sluggish, but of course there are some very good songs here though.
The things that I enjoyed was the vocals for example, I am a big fan of ¨Testament¨ because of the vocals, Steve's vocals is very similar to Chuck Billy's vocals that it is almost spooky. He has the same depth and dark tune as Chuck's vocals has, I guess that there are people that would think that Steve is Billy. A thing that I enjoyed very much of this album was the balance bewteen the instruments, this time there is nothing that sounds overdone or is to loud. The guitars sounds thicker and stronger, the drumming is quite improved and the vocals are very good. The bass is still quite low but you can hear is pretty good, but there is still no variation in the bass such as solos or stuff like that.
And now to the things that I didn't like at all, the songs. Most songs bored me so hard, when I listen to the album on my walkman I do not know when the album has been repeated, some songs that I find good reminds me where in the album I'm at, but otherwise I'm just lost. As i said, the songs are boring, the songs has good intros but the main pattern in the songs becomes sluggish and uncatchy, the riffing isn't flowing and the drumming slows down. The riffing is quite advanced but the riffs does not fit to the songs, fast riffs to a slow song does not make any success if you ask me.
Oh, my reviews starts to get shorter I see now, I couldn't find any more details about this album so I hope this was good enough. This is what I felt about this album, I think it sounds like a ¨Testament¨ copy when I hear Steve's vocals and almost every song bored me. There was some song that was really good to me but most of the time I just got bored, I used to thrash-metal which is fast, heavy, melodic and a bit aggressive like ¨Megadeth¨, ¨Overkill¨, ¨Kreator¨, ¨Testament¨ and lots of others. This is the only thrash-metal band that I have felt bad about. I could recommend this album and band to thrash-metal fans and/or other metal heads.
PROS
+ Better sound when it comes to the instruments
+ The vocals are good (people who like Testament would like this)
CONS
- The songs are boring, there is no real thrash spirit in them
- The song-patterns is to variating
RECOMMENDED TRACKS
-- Dead Silence
-- The Chosen
Overall album rating will be: 2/5
