Album Rating: 5.0

Haha. Granted, you can give me stick about grammar and choice of expression... but, I fail to see how my appreciation of a record can be critiqued rationally unless we had a shared meaning of vocabulary and bench-marking for experience. So what if I gave a 5 - I felt that Trivium made a complete Trivium album - they did not make a complete (fill in your favourite band here) album so that maybe why you disagree - more power to you for disagreeing.



Couldn't care less about what 'folk round here' do as a normative practice - surely it'd be a boring echo chamber if everyone thought and expressed the same things?



Thanks for +ve comments - and I appreciate any push-back conducted in a meaningful way.

Album Rating: 5.0

I guess different people see the same ratings very, very differently.



While growing up I got used to the Romanian school grading system (1 to 10 scale, where 10 is max and you need a 5 to pass the year) so when I need to rate something, even now, a more than a decade later, I usually think things on that system, where anything below the middle of the interval is utter crap and not worth having another look at.



So, for me a 2.5 rating would be the minimum barely acceptable rating for something (let's say for an album off which I like only ~25% of the songs), while for others 2.5 is a decent rating. I would rate 3 only if I would consider the album "meh" (like ~40% of the songs). A 4 would be something like "this is cool" (like ~60% of the songs) and a 5 would be an "awesome" (like over 75% of the songs, which is the case with this album).

Album Rating: 1.0 | Sound Off

I think most would presume a 5/5 means you like... 5... out of 5 songs. Liking 75% of an album shouldn't warrant a perfect score in most people's books.

5/5 means that the album is flawless and there is no room for improvement. If you only like 75% of the songs, that means that 1/4 of the album isn't good. Hardly deserving of a perfect score. It's not a pass/fail system like in school. It's a way of ranking the album against other albums. If an album has every song be perfect, doesn't it deserve a higher score than the album where a quarter of them are bad?

Album Rating: 5.0

Thanks for the clarifications on scoring! Much appreciated.



I guess that I could concede that maybe 5/5 is a bit over zealous.



But, I do like every song for what each song is, I am convinced that, like Shogun, it will age well, as each song has some interesting features that I found particularly good. And, it is the best Trivium album that Trivium could've done at this time - so I stand by assessment that this is the most 'Trivium' Trivium album to date.

Album Rating: 5.0

Yeah, but I'm every picky and I've never, ever had an album on which I liked all songs (this one included), so this means I would never be able to give anything a 5 star rating. So, considering this, if an album has 8 very good songs and two I don't particularly enjoy (like Endless Nights and Thrown into the Fire here), then that album is still a 5 from my point of view.

Album Rating: 4.5 | Sound Off

It's nice to have more generous raters here to counterbalance the obviously less generous ones.

Album Rating: 4.0

Never seen a review with this many pos/neg's and have so little comments lol

Album Rating: 4.0

best trivium agreed m/

still blows me away how good this is

Album Rating: 4.5

Probably best Trivium after In the Court of the Dragon.

Shogun tho

Also Ember to Inferno is pretty underrated.

Album Rating: 4.5

Shogun is really good. Definitely their third best. Never really got into the debut outside the title track. It is good but all other albums did that style far better imo.

Album Rating: 3.5

Fuck I totally forgot about this band for a few years, gotta revisit this asap

Album Rating: 3.5

Unfortunately this did not age that well for me. Still some really sick tracks here but there's also a lot of completely forgettable songs as well

Album Rating: 4.0

It's a shame this record doesn't have the drummer from Vengenance Falls / In Waves tbh, he really fit this band best imo. Can probably see my rating for this drop if I do a relisten.