Fallujah – Dreamless

In a twist of irony, Dreamless goes about to create a dream-like state, with spacey riffs, and electronic tracks, and makes an album whose entire premise has been done before, and done better. Fallujah has gone much more into the djent category, to the point where I would almost say this is more djent than tech death. Rarely do the guitars have that monstrous growl you find in death metal, mostly residing on a clean, gutteral, mechanical burps you find in djent. While there is plenty of technicality, I feel like any melodic composition is thrown out the window in favor of atmosphere, and by atmosphere I mean ambient chugging. It doesn’t feel like a tech death album, or at the very least, feels like a tech death album that went through the entire Nuclear Blastify process, instead of showing any kind of resistance. Any time you have that many guest artists for the vocals on a death metal album, you know something is not right. Dreamless feels like manufactured product, made specifically to be sold to the masses.

And that wouldn’t be so bad if the ideas on the album were at least somewhat coherent. Tracks like Adrenaline sound like the band picked what fucking ideas they thought of in the shower, and threw any that sounded good in the track, without thinking on whether it made a coherent song. And to be fair, in the most superficial level possible, it definitely “sounds good”. This is one of those albums that doesn’t really have a defining lovable aspect to it, or any reason for me to heavily praise it, but I’m sure if I listened to this as just background music for uh, idunno, whatever the fuck people who listened to the Black Dahlia Murder one time and then posted on facebook about how they’re ordering the satanic bible from amazon prime do for fun, I would probably very much enjoy it.

Dreamless lacks any sort of depth or replay value that’s required for a great album, but for a commercial product I can’t really fault it for having it’s, well, faults. It’s a pretty nice album. It’s the epitome of a band selling the fuck out, and basically represents a lot of what is wrong with commercial technical death metal. But it’s nice enough.

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6/10

He Whose Ox Is Gored – The Camel, the Lion, the Child ALBUM REVIEW

This is an example of a perfectly fine album that does all the things right, even has some experimentation aspects into it, but doesn’t cut it because it doesn’t have that “wow” factor. “The Camel, the Lion, the Child”  is quite an accessible album, despite having a name that sounds like the sad mix of an early 2010s metalcore and an unknown european 1970s prog rock album. It has some of the best riff work this year, with everything being simple enough to be catchy, but complex enough to remain interesting. Quite a while after I listened to this I still had some of them blasting in my head. Or they would be blasting if this album was particularly harsh. This is definitely on the quieter side of sludge metal. It still has enough of an edge to keep you focused, but it’s definitely subdued compared to other records.

I really like the sense of progression in the album. The ambient bits are very well done for how little they appear, and I actually love the acoustic guitar interwoven on these quiet sections. Gives the listener a nice break. The synths are also actually quite good, despite being fairly obvious. I see them as more white noise in this album. Filling in the blanks in between the guitars and the drums. I tried to imagine how it’d hear with just the physical instruments, and I think it would be extremely empty.

The issue I have with this album is again, that there’s really nothing that overally excites me when I listen to this.. There’s nothing that blows you away, or makes you think it’s anything more than just pretty good prog sludge. It’s extremely catchy, complex enough to keep me interested, and has excellent riffs, but at the end of the day, all I can do after listening is muster a theoretical gold clap.

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6.75/10

Lustre – Blossom ALBUM REVIEW

One of these days I’ll learn that when you see the tags “Atmospheric Black Metal” and “Ambient”, that doesn’t mean it’s going to sound like Burzum, it’s going to be bad, new age synths with just enough metal aspects (there are technically guitars and drums in it to call it metal, and because it’s in a minor key, it has to be black metal, right?). Anyway, yeah this is shit. The entire album is just poorly made up synth melody lines with ambient drones in the background with drums, and if you listen closely enough, you’ll occasionally a hear a guitar and what I think are some rough vocal screams, but I wasn’t quite sure. The tracks are labeled Part 1-4 but nothing about this is a continuation of any of the other tracks, other than the fact that they sound basically identical to each other (every song but the last one is in the same key). I would think that creativity would be a prerequisite for being a musical artist, but time and time again I’m proven wrong, and it’s rather unfortunate.

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2/10

Darkeater – Иней чёрного рассвета ALBUM REVIEW

3.5/10

Crown of Twilight – Shadow Kingdom ALBUM REVIEW

I don’t feel like this deserves a long review so I’ll skip the intro section and go right into it. This album is bad, there’s no other way to say it. No matter how long the tracks are, it’s really just one riff repeated over and over again until the song ends. The synths are bad, and the guitar tone varies from actually quite listenable, to extremely shallow and hard to hear. I should’ve known this by the cover honestly. The picture is nice, and the logo is cool, but it just looks too clean and crisp. It looks amateurish really. The only reason this doesn’t have a lower rating is how inoffensive it is. Because while not much goes on, it’s harder to rate something lower for doing too little, than by doing a lot, but doing it all wrong. So yeah, this is bad, don’t listen to it and all that jazz.

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2.75/10