Review Summary: boring tech groove for metalheads and metalheads only.
Technicality in music is occasionally interesting, if only because of the times when it’s used properly by bands like The Fall of Troy or Protest the Hero to bring exhilarating energy to their music. Most extremely technical music wasn’t meant to be enjoyed by the singer-songwriter types, and honestly, I could care less about that sort of thing. However, for every band that uses technicality to use well, there are fifty million bands that don’t. These bands got the impression that technicality could make up for any and all songwriting faults. Divine Heresy is one of those bands, and their debut
Bleed The Fifth is just inexcusably boring and although musically technical, truly lacks in persona and songwriting chops.
The highlight throughout the album, for the most part, is the technical prowess of drummer Tim Yeung. Simply put, he beats the drum kit to a blood pulp with fast energetic fills and re-vamped blast beats to fit Dino Cazares’ groove riffs. His playing throughout most of the album is impressive, but this is mostly shown on the single “Failed Creation”, with slow-fast-slow-fast-med-paced verse. The sad thing about his talent is that, despite this huge amount of talent, it is not near enough to save an entire album of overly boring technical guitar playing.
Guitarist Dino Cazares’ playing on the guitar is, simply put, uninspired. It’s like he decided to recycle every riff he’s played over his career, only speed up or slowed down, depending on the situation. For every interesting piece of guitar work that comes up (like the None So Vile-era Cryptopsy-esqe riff before the solo on “Bleed The Fifth”), there are about twenty Pantera-esqe groove riffs that are simply sped up for the sake of being technical. His performance shows that, while Dino has potential as a guitarist, he simply plays the riffs just to play riffs, not to add anything to the music.
This leads me to the largest flaw with the album, Vocalist Tommy Vext. There is something seriously wrong with Dino if he thought this guy would fit in with this band well, because Tommy’s harsh’s aren’t nearly harsh enough, while his cleans just sound out of place. His screaming voice just sounds hallow throughout most of the album, and frankly it just gets embarrassing by the end of the album. His clean voice, while decent at times, sounds like a poor man’s Christian Älvestam, who in himself sounds like a poor man, and just doesn’t fit any of the music.
Despite all these flaws, there are still highlights all over the album, scattered in between songs. “Bleed The Fifth”’s ending parts flow excellently from the Cryptopsy-like riffing in the interlude to the solo, which sounds more like a tribute to Kirk Hammett’s playing style, the occasional wah pedal and the exceptional use of the pentatonic scale. “Impossible Is Nothing” could count as somewhat of a highlight, seeing as they finally managed to fit Tommy Vext into the band, in the futuristic, Scar Symmetry-esqe chorus, plus the riffs spearheading into the last chorus show an almost Necrophagist taste of technicality. “Failed Creation” is fairly accessible compared to rest of the album, with more of a regular structure and less boring wank than most of the tracks. “Rise of the Scorned” has a drawling acoustic intro and interlude, but leads back into the normal Divine Heresy intro, Tommy hoarsely screaming while Dino ‘shreds’ his way to the verse.
And that’s really the albums biggest problem. Every song starts out the same, goes through the same structure, and for the most part, ends the same. There’s not too much variety, it’s all the same, full blasts of arpeggio-abusive groove metal that sounds way to similar to Dino’s earlier work. As lead songwriter, Dino is a gigantic failure on this album, making no cohesively interesting songs anywhere in the album, making a single (“Failed Creation”), and then repeating. Pseudo ballads like “Rise of The Scorned” and “False Gospel” are ballads simply ballads mainly because the chorus is ever so slightly brighter than the rest of the album, or in the case of the earlier case, because of an acoustic intro and interlude. What makes matters worse, the actually ballad “Closure” is worse than any track on the album, going in the usual boring formula of ballads by going from soft in the beginning to loud in the end. Simply put, it’s like every other ballad ever written in the metal genre, and done better and less tediously by just about any good metal band (not this band).
Although interesting upon early listening, Divine Heresy’s debut
Bleed The Fifth is mind numbingly boring as you listen more and more. Upon closer inspection, the band pretty much uses every cook and nary in the metal genre and just re-apply to faster, ‘future metal’, and it just sounds cheesy and lame as a whole. If I were to recommend anything to the listener, I’d say listen to the opening two songs, seeing as if you listen any further you’ll just get bored out of your mind anyway, no matter how many acoustic intro’s you put into your music.
Recommended Tracks:
“Failed Creation”
“Bleed The Fifth”
