Review Summary: A decent follow-up to one of the worst metal albums ever made.
Equilibrium is one weird band, ladies and gents. Starting off in the mid-2000s, they were all about combining triumphant folk/viking metal with grandiose symphonic black metal. Their 2008 album,
Sagas blew the door off of the metal community, lauded for its ability to combine the darkness of black metal with flutes, horns, keyboards and all kinds of other things to make an album that sounded like you were smack dab in the middle of the Dark Ages while also providing uplifting riffage and an overall conquering feeling. All of their albums after
Sagas have been a mixed bag for fans. I personally enjoyed everything up until
Renegades, an album that saw the band do a complete 180 to metalcore, trance, and yes, even radio-friendly butt rock. It's not the switch in sound that made it a bad album, it was more the overall lack of passion that they previously displayed. It was alarming and sad to see this band lose everything that made them great in the first place.
Equinox is the follow-up to
Renegades, and needless to say, I was extremely skeptical going in, but I do have to say, while they probably will never reach the heights of
Sagas again, it's still a ginormous improvement over their previous monstrosity in every way imaginable. That's not to say that this album is perfect by any means. Right off the bat the opener ‘Earth Tongue’ reveals that the gargantuan black metal sounds of the past are still very much gone and replaced with metalcore, melodeath and trance metal, but those influences are nowhere near as egregious as they were on the last album.
While
Equinox is definitely an improvement, it's still pretty sad to see these guys still as a shell of their former selves. Tracks like ‘Bloodywood’ and ‘One Hundred Hands’ show off some pretty sweet trance riffage, but the metalcore bits are just so damn generic. The breakdowns have little-to-no bite to them and just come off as lazy. Other tracks like ‘Awakening’ and ‘Borrowed Waters’ show glimpses of the past with full-on orchestral folk sections and beautiful female vocals, but these moments are too few and far between on
Equinox.
With all of that being said, this album really isn't terrible at all, but it also isn't that great. Like I said, there are moments of soaring epicness throughout, but they don't last nearly as long as they could or should. Replacing black metal with metalcore would be fine if the metalcore parts had any kind of originality to them, but sadly, that's just not the case for most of this album. Fans of early Equilibrium will most likely hate
Equinox, and to be honest, I wouldn't blame them for it. On the other hand, it's possible that fans will find something to enjoy here depending on how willing they are to expand their horizons.
Equinox is nothing more than a decent follow-up to one of the worst metal albums ever made, and in all seriousness, it could be a whole lot worse.
