“Sarcastrophe” is a good start. Hard to be negative about “The Negative One”. “Custer” made me giggle.
On the whole, Slipknot do very little good here. They were always Insane Clown Posse with guitars, so I’m glad they’ve reverted to the fruity, unpretentious style of S/T thru to Vol 3 (or perhaps you’d prefer to hear their opinions about the Iraq war). But the songs aren’t catchy or interesting. This is a big problem.
Most of them ride predictable Machine Head-inspired groove riffs and double bass flurries – this is the type of album that make you feel like a sorcerer because you can predict exactly what will come next. Others attempt emotion and land with a splash in boredom.
“Approaching Original Gayness” (or whatever) sounds like “Before I Forget” with a sugary clean-sung chorus tacked on in a way that doesn’t make sense. Lead single “The Devil in I” starts out with an animated uptempo riff, then slows down and immediately starts spiralling the toilet. Boring idea after boring idea. I hate this song.
“Skeptic” is a tribute to bassist Paul Gray, who recently caught a bad case of dead. It has a cute chorus and not much else. “Goodbye” is long and tedious, speeding up and slowing down seemingly at random. If this song was an actual “goodbye” it would be an unwanted houseguest you’re trying to shoo out and who keeps trying to tell you his life story. Shut up already. Save it for your memoir. No, I won’t read it there, either.
At times the album barely sounds finished. The songs change from section to section haphazardly, and the tracklisting induces further whiplash. “Custer” and “The Negative One” have a nearly identical screech sample and a similar breakdown chorus…and they’re separated by just a 2 minute interlude. It’s like listening to the same song twice.
The occasional interesting riff and energetic moment keeps things moving forward and patches over the bad moments somewhat. This is their first album without Joey “needs a stepping stool to reach the drumkit” Jordison, which was a turn for the better. Judging from Scar the Martyr, he was responsible for the band’s self-serious period. But the band doesn’t exactly return to form, either, mostly because Slipknot never really had a “form” to return to.
A few entertaining moments. At least 40 minutes of narcolepsy inducing crap. All hail Slipknot.
As I’ve said elsewhere, you can’t really call Manowar a band any more. For the past twenty years they’ve been bassist Joey DeMaio’s Little Alimony Fund That Could, a relentless cash generating machine that probably actually isn’t all that relentless…or cash generating.
Somewhere around 1992, they lost all their work ethic in the studio, and started filling the gaps with compilations, remasters, re-releases, and a neverending deluge of live albums (if you’re a Manowar completist, you’ve probably bought “Battle Hymns” at least a dozen times.) Here’s Joey DeMaio’s latest “gimme your lunch money” – a re-recording of the band’s legendary 1990 album Kings of Metal.
What a terrible idea.
If you ask a group of Manowar fans to pick the band’s greatest album, half will immediately answer Kings of Metal, and the other half will not be able to agree on a challenger to the throne. I’ve always found it inconsistent and half-cocked, but at its best it’s a superb slab of early power metal, and most of its shortcomings are found at the conceptual level – you can’t really “fix” it. So why this re-recording? Because Joey DeMaio likes caviar.
They changed the tracklisting. Now we start with “Hail and Kill” – fantastic on the 1990 version, dull and slowed down here. Eric Adams’ voice is haggard, clearly Frankensteined together from many edits and overdubs. Then we’ve got the title track. “Other bands play, Manowar kill!” Other bands play, Manowar bilk their fans. “Heart of Steel” sounds pretty solid. I’ll say this, they nail ballads much better than they used to.
Raging speed-fest “Wheels of Fire” is featured here as “On Wheels of Fire”, and sounds muddy, downtuned and shit-awful. The drums actually sound weaker than they did in 1990 – the kind of relentless percussive assault you get from tapping a pencil on a school desk. Then there’s “Blood of the Kings”, which Joey makes annoying as hell by adding all sorts of extra shout-outs to fans in various countries “Argentina, Japan, Portugal, Lithuania, Canada, Spain, Israel…” – is this a geography quiz? Kings of Metal‘s lesser tracks like “Kingdom Come” were mediocre then and remain mediocre now. Note that they didn’t even bother re-recording “Pleasure Slave.”
Eric Adams is showing his age. He used to hit all sorts of ungodly notes in E, now he stays far away from them in D. Joey DeMaio’s a bit too prominent in the mix, frequently turning the album into mud. Karl Logan is actually a saving grace. Most Manowar fans are a bit leery of him, but his dry whammy-abusing style works really well for the band. One of Kings of Metal MMXIV‘s rare treats is a guitar instrumental of “Heart of Steel”, which sounds really powerful and emotional.
But ultimately, Kings of Metal MMXIV is underwhelming and unimpressive – and even if it had been executed perfectly it would still have been a lame cash grab. Why am I still a fan of Manowar? Because Joey DeMaio VERY occasionally decides to boost Magic Circle Music’s bottom line by releasing excellent music. This isn’t one of those times.
In 2008 the two-piece Norwegian collective known as Keldian released their opus Journey of Souls, and entered a period of radio silence. Soon rumors were swirling online – mostly about Justin Bieber’s love life, but also about Keldian’s future. Was the band done? Or was a third album getting ready to emerge?
But now Outbound is out, and I can see that the truth was neither of these things. The band isn’t done. And Outbound doesn’t just emerge, it comes at you in front of 180 tons of burning rocket fuel. Holy shit, this album kills! Maybe the best power metal release I’ve heard all year!
“Burn the Sky” fades in with baleful electronic drone, and then launches into an agitated uptempo thrasher with an huge-sounding chorus. I actually looked up the meaning of the lyrics and I wish I hadn’t – something trite and silly about American foreign policy. Oh well. “Earthblood” is more sedate, featuring acoustic guitars and female vocals, but the largeness and sense of grandeur remains.
Then there’s “Kepler and 100,000 Stars”, which switches between a Scorpions-like riff and fast bruising speed metal sections. “Never Existed” and “A Place Above the Air” are huge anthemic stadium-fillers, which is ironic since Keldian never plays live at all, let alone in a stadium. “The Silfen Paths” is lengthy and progressive, seeming to channel Pink Floyd more than Iron Maiden and Helloween, with a spacey bridge that serves as a reminder of Keldian’s origins as an ambient rock band.
But the band has saved the best for last. “FTL” is probably the greatest thing yet to bear the Keldian name. It does not have a boring moment from start to finish – nearly eight minutes of Mach 5 velocity with the band beating on you with their superior songwriting skill. There’s a brief quiet interlude in the middle, featuring JFK’s iconic moon landing speech and a soft reprise of the chorus. The final words uttered in this song seem to answer and challenge the chorus of “Burn the Sky”, adding a sense of closure to Outbound.
There’s nothing to say about Outbound except that my expectations were high and yet were totally surpassed. The band just kicks it up a notch all around – better singing and performing, a larger guitar presence, more organic production, and best of all…it’s really an album!
Keldian’s first two albums listened like collections of songs. This might seem like a strange complaint, since that’s the definition of what an album is. But there’s a difference between ten songs assembled without rhyme or reason, like bedraggled survivors plucked out of the water by a lifeboat, and ten songs working in unity for a common purpose, like a rowing crew. Outbound is the second kind of album. The sum is way better than the parts – and the parts are already amazing.
