Review Summary: Despite the album name, "Titan" fails to live up to Septicflesh's truely titanic past albums.
Now a little while ago, I heard one of the album's singles entitled "Order of Dracul" and to put it rather simply, I thought it was boring, uninspired, badly mixed and chaotically all over the place. I also hoped that it was merely a bad single and that the album would be much better. Unfortunately, this wasn't the case and as it turns out the single (and the others released later) was a precursor to the album quality as a whole. Which honest to God is a complete lazy mess.
"Titan" proves itself to be something that feels as if its trying to be big and ambitious (hence the name) and yet completely fails to reach any marks that it tries to get to. The overall composition of the vast majority of these songs is so utterly chaotic and messy that they make absolutely no sense, jumping from one idea to the next, constantly shifting tempo and tone, awkwardly going into these sloppy sounding classical sections (I.E. random hapsichord section on "Order of Dracul") with little purpose and overall having no real direction, making each song feel more like a sloppy mishmash of ideas that weren't properly mixed together to create a cohesive song. This as a result makes each song completely unrecognizable as they, as I said, don't have a clear direction and don't have a clear identity. This is a problem made worse by the fact that the performances don't all that inspired. That said, one positive is the orchestral arrangements which sound incredibly powerful and quite beautiful at times. This would be better if it weren't for the rest of the sound getting in their way all the time.
Another problem that this album suffers from greatly is its production and mixing which sounds like garbage. The guitars are paper thin and constantly being overpowered by the drums, which themselves sound oddly synthetic. The production manages to exacerbate this problem by making every instrument sound disconnected rather than properly mixed together into one sound. The vocals aren't any better honestly. Seth's vocals are alright, no better or worse than before, but the clean vocals are still around (unfortunately) and are just as annoying and whiny as before.
In short, "Titan" is an album that doesn't know where to go or what to do. It's like the band had a lot of ideas for it, but didn't want to scrap any of them so they just took em and mixed them together in the sloppiest way imaginable. The result is that the album shoots itself in the foot and makes every song sound and feel poorly composed, badly mixed, overly ambitious and all over the place. Septicflesh have done plenty of good work in the past, but this is honestly just a complete mess. Better luck next time, guys.
(Originally posted on the Metal Archives under username "EschatonOmega")
