✦✧✧✧ Why is everyone trying to go industrial in 2019?! I mean, I get that cultural trends come back every 15-20 years, but why not bring back early Mastodon or Slipknot? Considering the greatness of the band’s previous album, the post-djent masterpiece “Mesmer,” this feels like a step backward when considering any criterion imaginable. See the rest here
✦✧✧✧ Uninventive, uninspiring, and unnecessary. This is industrial by the book… if the book is from the mid-90s. See the rest here
✦✧✧✧ Who even wants to make industrial anymore? This is fucking awful. See the rest here
✦✧✧✧ Less entertaining than the band’s prior album “Forever Becoming,” this collection of instrumental sludgy post-metal songs asks too much indulgence in its aimlessness. I’m sure I’d like it a lot more if I was baked out of my fucking skull, but that should be a value-add, not a requirement. See the rest here
✦✧✧✧ “Vintage” is right; this album feels stuck in time, comprised of a lot of ill-fitting parts. The slop-like production only makes things worse, but the bigger problem is a poor sense of pacing, seemingly in service of mood but actually the album’s biggest enemy. See the rest here
✦✧✧✧ What is this, Deafheaven? See the rest here
✦✧✧✧ This album feels like an unholy blend of every major nu-metal band’s example of their One Album After Their Last Good One. See the rest here
✦✧✧✧ This self-described “black metal meets negro spirituals” feels like a double case of smarmy cultural appropriation. At least it’s unusual. See the rest here
✦✧✧✧ Limp Bizkit meets RATM meets Butcher Babies meets Soulfly meets Body Count with just a hint of past-their-prime Ministry. In other words: a hot mess. See the rest here
✦✧✧✧ The good news is that this is often a spot-on homage to Death (specifically, the classic album “Spiritual Healing”). And when Gruesome is in this Tribute Mode (as they largely were on their debut album “Savage Land,” you had a sense of extrapolation into something both old and new. The bad news is that, more often than not, the music on this new album feels like the band simply took Spiritual Healing sheet music, put it in a shredder, taped the scraps back together, traveled from Orlando to Tampa (and from 2018 to 1989), found Scott Burns, and got him to record it. See the rest here
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