Review Summary: Fifteen year olds playing metallica covers and decent new heavy metal. Surprised? Well, consider they're with a big label. The world has come to an end.
Teenage angst has never been a good indicator in the history of mankind. Considering the driving force of youth is propelled by testosterone, progesterone and otherwise dangerous, unstable, fear-inducing steroid hormones produced naturally by the human body, it’s a pretty tame and considerably boring source of musical inspiration. Let’s think of Trivium for a second.
What happened to Trivium? That’s a question that emerges when you consider what they did with songs like “Like Light to Flies”, which sounded astoundingly promising when it first hit the radios (and people’s computers and MP3 players, of course). Then they seemed to stop caring about making good music, then they forgot completely why they were doing what they once started, and well. They are now lost forever in the impending sea of bands that were promising for a brief second.
Watching MTV the other day, I was watching a show called “Playlist”, which features random videos with a certain theme to them. The theme that was being displayed was “Choices of the Week”, which I thought was interesting, since most things MTV shows as awesome are usually of poor quality for the more “diverse-listening ear”. Black Tide came on and I was astonished by the strangely grungy looking hair, mildly interesting riffs… and the fact that all the band members looked strangely young, and their hands seemed too soft to pull off some butt-kicking riffs.
Consider that not one single band member can legally drink in the U.S. Consider that the bands that probably influenced this group of youngsters are now dead or simply gave up on making tolerable music. This is a train wreck waiting to happen, to be quite honest. Except it’s not, really!
Light From Above is, against what logic would imply, surprisingly good.
Shockwave, the single that I watched on TV is nice sounding, has interesting riffs
a-lá 80’s thrash metal and two solos. Even though the music itself is not a mixture of old-school thrash metal and hardcore influences, the solos have that strangely-metalcore-resembling sound to it, which just sounds Trivium-esque to the top of its capacity. It’s impossible to consider that an “interesting mixture”, since it’s been done already (by the aforementioned band) and it didn’t turn out to be any good at all, not because of an elitery attached to it, but because it just turned out to feel very boring.
Warriors of time starts with a very
Battery-esque finger-picked guitar riff, which is nice to listen to again and from such younglings, and
Give Me a Chance has an old
Judas Priest vibe to it. The easiest way to assimilate the observation is through comparison, using the “Fathers of Heavy and Thrash Metal” as a starting point and then make a fitting judgment of the piece as a whole. One of the most emblematic moments is when Metallica’s cover
Hit the Lights rumbles on. The cover is really good, although probably a lot better produced than the original, but still the essence is there, and probably that’s what the album lacks in term of average complexity: The songs are structured in such way that they resemble to the bands they emulate, like
Black Abyss which sounds like Megadeth, but there was no need of adding strings for the mere “ambiental sensation” it could deploy, or the piano introduction to
Light From Above. These little elements don’t make the music more interesting or less appealing, but they are not important enough to make the album better than it is: A nice return to the roots of heavy metal.
The album is a weird lyrical moment. While most of the lyrics are about (yeah) angsty teenagers wanting to destroy things, or about having fun, or about bad relationships, it’s more reminiscing of arena rock than thrash metal, or heavy metal like
Judas Priest in their early days (think of
Hell Bent for Leather) or the non-war-or-book related lyrics by
Iron Maiden. Even the songs that are supposed to be serious like
Warriors of Time are hardly interesting because it’s just a rant with no particular context, therefore making it not-so-interesting.
Most of it has an authentic 80’s sound, the atmospheres are correct, the riffs are in place, the attitude is there… so what could be missing? Well, nothing really. As it is, the album is both engaging and stands on its own as a modern masterpiece, both for the refreshing old metal sound (think of
The Darkness except emulating actually good music) and for the fact that the band members were not even 20 when they recorded the album. Its flaws are resented in that area too, since it won’t be easy to maintain the spirit if these kids are not smart. They can end up boring as *** just like Trivium, or actually make something interesting out of this experiment. If Interscope (yes, surprising) doesn’t mess with what these kids are doing, they might end up making a second album that doesn’t mix things that should be mixed, in any level. As an emulation of old music it stands out amongst its competitors for making things right.
