Review Summary: Twelve Foot Ninja sliced the album in halves to mixed results.
As many music lovers might know, the first album by Twelve Foot Ninja,
Silent Machine, was an excellent record which especially impressed with its eclecticism. Having mixed metal, funk, bossa nova and other musical genres into a seemingly awkward but actually impressive cocktail, the Australians managed to set for themselves a high standard against which all their subsequent albums will be measured in one way or another. After a long wait and multiple concerts around the world in support of
Silent Machine, in August 2016 Twelve Foot Ninja released their next LP –
Outlier.
The experimental path chosen by the Australians for their sound creates certain limitations for the band, as in this case you need to simultaneously juggle a number of things that can be mutually exclusive. The main difficulty is figuring out the route to stick to following the release of a successful album. If your only objective is high sales and new fans, then it is enough to simply repeat the effective recipe on the subsequent records, providing new helpings of what caught the listeners’ fancy in the first place. All that is required of the band is to release quality songs. Obviously, this approach only seems to be easy.
But what if there are also artistic ambitions? What if there is a desire to evolve, bringing something new to each album, something that not heard before (at least as part of their own sound)? In this case the path is a lot more difficult and entails a whole new bunch of questions. If the previous LPs already contained a mixture of genres, then what direction should they follow? Add more and more genres into the mix? Or concentrate on the sounds already employed, changing their ratio upward or downward? Or drop that eclecticism thing and turn to one genre? In the meantime, it would also be nice not to alienate the existing fanbase, but only to expand it. These are the questions I pondered on while listening to the new Twelve Foot Ninja album. It is possible that the same thoughts came to the minds of the Australians as well. However, it seems they failed to come up with answers to these questions during the recording of
Outlier.
The album leaves the impression that the band, having thought about the abovementioned, decided to chase everything at once. Hence, there is a mishmash of approaches. As a result, the LP ended up being uneven, and the fans (or casual listeners) got the tracks of various levels of interest. Tentatively,
Outlier can be divided into two even halves. The first half, consisting of five songs, is at the beginning of the album and includes the strongest set, with
Invincible being a definite high point. Here, Twelve Foot Ninja demonstrated their approach at its best – something streamlined on previous releases: while listening to it, an idea inadvertently creeps in that the band managed to continue the successful streak they started with
Silent Machine.
However, then – maybe because of contemplations referred to earlier, maybe because they run out of steam – the Australians seem to give up at the midpoint, and the next batch of songs feels weaker compared to what came before. This batch comprises the second half. There, the focus gradually shifts towards the djent sound, and the remaining tracks begin to feel more monotonous and one-dimensional. Moreover, structurally the songs tend to follow the standard “verse-chorus-interlude-chorus”, and it becomes clearer why, on the second half, interest starts to wane. By the end of the album (its duration only about 39 minutes), you just wait when it plays out. But don’t think that the songs are terrible. It’s just that the listener might expect something different from a Twelve Foot Ninja album.
Still, despite the fact that the new LP turned out to be less successful compared to the previous album, it is too early to write the perky Australians off. Even if only half of the songs are of high caliber, give this a chance, especially if you like
Silent Machine or their EPs. It is possible that you may find something of interest on the second half of the CD, since everybody knows that musical taste is a personal matter.
