This album is one of the most misunderstood albums I own. Trivium has started out when vocalist/guitarist Matt Heafy was only 13 years old, and started to scream the lyrics because every time he tried to sing his voice would crack. This album has very little screaming and now it seems everyone hates them. Here is my opinion of
The Crusade.
This album may not be as good as their most most previous release,
Ascendancy, but I believe that
The Crusade is an excellent and very entertaining album, that should satisfy most metal fans. Songs like
Ignition and
Anthem (We Are The Fire) should not be compared to the once screaming Trivium, but respected by the effort put into them. While there are some disappointing tracks on this particular album, like
And Sadness Will Sear and
The Rising, it is an excellent album overall.
The sound of the songs
do kind of sound like the band Trivium worships, Metallica, but there is not a problem with that. Many people do think that Trivium are trying to be Metallica, and an interview last year revealed that Heafy thought they were going to be “the next Metallica,” which upset many fans, but I don’t care. I care about the great music that this package contains.
A very thrashy album, but not metalcore sounding like their previous releases,
The Crusade is hated by many (it seems) because of the way Heafy’s voice changed to a James Hetfield replica (sorry for mentioning that, but I would have gotten negged big time if I didn’t). The music does sound like it could be a Metallica album from the
…And Justice For All era. Many fans would have been happy if Metallica released this album as their own, and if Trivium never released it.
The guitar solos are somewhat impressive, but nothing that you would remember. And nothing you would call a “classic guitar solo” but the guitar riffs are very catchy and heavy, and they are what keeps the songs strong. The song with the best solo on here is probably
Tread The Floods which is nice and melodic and played at a moderate speed.
One love song on this one
This World Can’t Tear Us Apart, and it is a good one, but not great. Up tempo songs, like
To The Rats and
Ignition improve this album greatly.
The production is great, and the songs are wonderfully put together. But, the lyrics lack in some places. Some examples of the not so good lyrics are:
“Break All The Bones In Your Face, If you mess with my life….”(To The Rats)
…which sounds like a lame attempt to be mean and cool.
But there are the points of the project where the lyrics are pretty cool:
“For your honour, you will slaughter, every one of your daughters…”(Unrepentant)
…which is probably my favourite lyric in the album.
The title track is actually a pretty good song, but if you cut around 4 minutes off this 8 minute plus song, it would be a whole lot better. The first riff is kind of plain and bland and boring, but the riffs other than that are amazing sounding. The best riff in this song first appears approx. at the 3:47 mark. It’s pretty much the length of the song that is the problem with it.
The choruses are all well written and catchy, (especially
Tread The Floods) and fit in the songs very nicely for the most part. But the singing on
Entrance Of The Conflagration is somewhat annoying at times, which brings down the song a whole lot.
In conclusion, this is a very underrated album, mostly misunderstood because of Heafy’s voice sounding like James Hetfield’s. The songs in general are amazing, and they are very well written and constructed.
My Favourite Tracks
Ignition
Anthem(We Are The Fire)
To The Rats
Tread The Floods
youll see me after matt chants out the first whoa-whoa part, they switch cameras to just me and my friend...im the white guy on the right side of the screen with dark hair and my friend is the indian guy on the left. 
