Review Summary: Atrocious, boring, dull, bland, devoid of life, ruin your whole f*cking day, depressing... All of these words accurately sums up this album.
It should be enough to make any true fan of heavy music's ears bleed when they merely hear the name Trivium. The band has released several albums in the space of a short period of time, and not one of them has been anything more than average, but it really is coming to something when they can get away with releasing an album such as In Waves. There are many cliche's of metalcore, including ridiculously dull instrumental work with a lot of chugging and some terrible lyrics, and Trivium took it upon themselves to include every one of them in their latest studio album. At five albums into their career, one would expect the band to be maturing and evolving, not regressing from the thrashy style of metalcore they played on some of their earlier albums to the most bland rubbish ever put to record.
It seems that the band attempted to fool the listener into thinking that this was going to be semi-listenable by placing the best song right at the start of the album. Following a stupid introductory track that literally goes nowhere and is a waste of ninety seconds, the title track kicks in with some demented screaming that is actually rather well performed. This is not a track that will set the world alight due to the obsession with open string guitar work in the verse, but the chorus is sing along friendly and the riff during the chorus is also decent. After this is out of the way, however, one realizes exactly where any merits this album had on its first proper song are going-straight down the toilet. Inception Of The End opens with a generic, dull riff and the vocals sound as though Tim Lambesis lost all his energy (which he probably did whilst gripping the bar of soap in the jail cell) and feel far too strained, and the clean singing reminds me of the noise a leper might make whilst in their final stage of dying. This is one of the most painful atrocities my ears have ever undergone, and this only continues throughout all the tracks. Not one is even remotely good, and you would be better serving your time sticking pins into your eyelids or something similar.
The guitar work takes a minimalistic approach to a whole new degree. Watch The World Burn, aside from having a ridiculous title, has a stupid, disjointed riff that opens it up before fading out into some horrible vocals and chord-based playing where the chords are left to ring out whilst the twit who performs the guitars rests his poor fingers. The guitars on this release feel as though the guitarist is in his first week of playing and is just ripping off whatever Metallica or Pantera riffs they have actually heard, but are doing it really badly. The drumming is equally as bad, with a seeming fascination of only using the snare and the bass pedal, with the occasional cymbal hit that is left to ring out. After yet another piss-poor riff opens up Chaos Reigns, we get a beat that sounds like a pissed off Nigerian beating on his Tom Toms which is only made worse by the stupid, over-the-top modern production that every band uses. The bass is completely inaudible, which is probably a good thing as there isn't a rating low enough to score something that even has awful bass. It really wouldn't have been a difficult job to write bass for this album either, as the guitarists are that devoid of talent. Trivium really let their fans down here, but oh well, they are dumb just for supporting this band so its their fault really. *** it, I'm not wasting another second on this piece of ***.
