Review Summary: A throne awaiting its king.
I’m gonna say a couple words that might summon up a feeling of discomfort or even disgust: A YouTube musician largely known for making songs based on video games like FNAF and Bendy and the Ink Machine released an album of original songs. I’ll give you guys a moment to recover from the terror that statement brings.
In all seriousness, I have something of a soft spot for artists like NateWantsToBattle and CG5. Objectively, from a perspective of pure music criticism, they aren’t the best. But that doesn’t stop me from getting nostalgic chills whenever I hear the opening chords of, say, “Stay the Course” or “Phantom”.
I have no such reservations for Will Ryan of DAGames. See, his video game-inspired music came to my attention long after I had discovered NateWantsToBattle and Jonathan Young and the like. A lot of that was due to his heavier usage of metal elements and harsh vocals on a lot of his tracks. Shockingly though, when I did start diving into his catalogue, I found myself strangely entertained. His music was catchy and inoffensive at worst, but at its best, you had catchy and unique songs, like the electro-swing-style bop that is “Build Our Machine”. So when I heard that Will had a whole original project named Iris, I was rather excited to check it out!
Years later, I’m finally ready to give my opinion on
Goliath’s Throne, the first album officially released under the Iris Official name. And it’s... alright, I guess.
Yeah, a pretty underwhelming modern alt metal album, which means I get to have fun tearing apart its mediocrity!
We’ll start with the positives first. Will has a genuinely powerful voice with a good air of grandiosity about it, which gives
Goliath a sense of scale that the compositions can sometimes fail to deliver. His knack for melody writing is also pretty damn good, especially in the chorus department. “Hibernation”, “I’m the Animal”, “Surveillance”, and several others all live and die by the strength of their choruses. And the good songs here are genuinely really good! “Havok Be Thy Game” is a flamethrower intro track, “You’re Better Off” turns the tempo down for a surprisingly decent power ballad, and the title track mixes decent screams with some pretty well-layered instrumentals for a good proggy cut.
That said, the album has more misfires than hits. Actually, misfires is too grand a word to describe the album’s lower points. They’re not misfires so much as they are stumbles. The most glaringly obvious part is the production. Will’s not in a studio for this, he recorded this off a computer, and it shows in the production, what with the bass basically being invisible in the mix, and the instruments overall sounding flat (
especially the drums, and this album isn’t even the worst it gets).
Where things really fall flat is the overall length of this album, both in terms of its tracklist, and its individual song lengths. 14 tracks isn’t necessarily bloated for an album runtime, but when a large majority of those songs are 4 or 5 minutes long, you better be doing your damndest to ensure that they’re consistently interesting and keeping the audience hooked. The sheer number of times I DNFed this album until just recently should say a lot about how well Will succeeded there. Look, I’m a fan of mindless chugs as much as anyone (I listen to Periphery and TesseracT for god’s sake), but even I can only take so much before it just starts to get boring. And while
Goliath’s Throne starts out strong, it becomes clear that, melodically, there isn’t much standing out beyond a couple notable tracks like “Surveillance”, “Havok”, and “You’re Better Off”.
Compounding this is Will’s lyrics, far and away one of the worst parts of this album. This has always been a weak point, even when recording music under the DAGames label: Will’s lyrics can be cheesy bordering on cringey and pseudo-intellectual at times. “For I’m the Goliath, the Complex Messiah, I fight alone”, “Desolate improvisation, given absolution”, even song titles like “Testify the Modern Eye” end up reeking of thesaurus-searching or playing too hard into the grandiosity that Will’s voice provides. It almost loops back around to being funny, despite the fact that the songs are clearly meant to be taken seriously.
All-in-all, while these negatives don’t exactly make the album
bad per se, it does noticeably drag down a full listen. Spoilers for the next 2 Iris albums, Will patches up a lot of these issues. But considering this was the first official Iris release, it’s a shaky start to say the least.
