Review Summary: Nail in the coffin.
Thousand Foot Krutch was never a staple in the hard rock scene overall, but for a Christian hard rock band they were pretty decent for a while. They'd released two or three solid albums, with Welcome to the Masquerade being their peak. Then they decided to go independent, which at the time was just beginning to become a trend. Their first effort as an independent band (End Is Where We Begin) was pretty decent, even if the production and some of the songs weren't quite as slick as before. Then came Oxygen: Inhale, one of the biggest abominations of 2014. There was some hope that they could redeem themselves on Exhale, which was promised to be heavier than Inhale.
And that much is true; it gets back to the actual rock sound of TFK that you're used to. And it actually gets off to a pretty decent start with the singles "Running With Giants" and "Incomplete," the former of which has some pretty good guitar work, and the latter of which has a pretty decent radio-ready melody. The problem, though, is that's pretty much where the fun ends as it all goes downhill from there.
For much of the rest of the album, we're given a collection of rock songs that are pretty dull and unappealing, and they actually tend to blend into one another too. Songs like "The River," "Born Again," and "A Different Kind of Dynamite" just feel flat out sloppy and uninteresting. As per the usual, there's a couple songs where the lyrics ruin it ("Give Up the Ghost," "Can't Stop This") with lines like "The ghosts that haunt me have been outhaunted" and the music just doesn't flow that well for much of the way. The album ends with its only actual ballad ("Honest"), an acoustic exercise in boredom.
Ultimately, there's very little to actually like about this album. The first couple of songs are solid, but after that the only song that's actually decent is "Off the Rails." The rest of the songs pretty much all have some sort of fatal flaw--whether it's dull riffing ("Born Again"), a sloppy rhythm ("Adrenaline"), or just a rip-off of one of their older songs ("A Different Kind of Dynamite"). Even when a song like "Give Up the Ghost" has a brief moment of decency like a cool guitar rhythm immediately after its chorus, it's ultimately wasted.
To be fair, this is definitely a better album than Inhale. It actually has a few good songs and one is not necessarily completely bored to death for most of the way they were with Inhale. But two things are becoming pretty clear: one, some bands just shouldn't go independent as they just don't sound as good afterwards. Two, this band is definitely out of its prime. They just can't seem to get their groove back. Their collapse is pretty disappointing; Thousand Foot Krutch was never one of the top bands in the genre, but they used to be so much better than this.
