Review Summary: A band with potential plays it way too safe yet again.
Amarna Reign want so bad to be popular. You can see it in just about everything; the constant chugging, the clean choruses, the vocal effects, the occasional use of electronics, even the album art…it’s as if they’re on a mission to be the safest metalcore band ever. Every once in a while you hear a riff or a lead or something to that effect that makes you think “Man, these guys can be doing so much better” but instead they’ve stuck to taking the generic route on their second album,
Storms, to make sure they don’t scare any potential buyers away with “progression” or “creativity”.
Little to no improvement at all has been made from their debut album
Atonement, other than that they’ve noticeably increased the amount of breakdowns and chugs. More often than not, there’s some kind of chugging going on, which is just one of the things that make this album so dull. The instrumentation as a whole is just disappointing, because the bass might as well be nonexistent, and the drums don’t have a single interesting fill or pattern to be found. The vocals stick to basically the same low growl the whole time, and while there’s nothing particularly wrong with the vocalist’s growls, he only changes it up for maybe one or two screams and some decent clean vocals that are brought down by the monotonous and boring melodies. In addition to the generic guitar parts, this isn’t looking very good. However, this album isn’t totally terrible. The saving grace is that while everything is about as generic as could be, nothing is done explicitly wrong.
The riffs on this album are actually pretty good, but since they all sound basically the same, that can’t be considered much of a strong point. There is nothing here that stands out as bad; in fact nothing stands out at all. Nothing on this album really catches the listener’s attention in any way, be it positive or negative. A decent song played ten times over just makes for one painfully average album. It’s clear that Amarna Reign could be making music worth listening to, but I don’t see that happening. They just don’t want to risk having fans not pleased by a change in their sound. With the potential they have, one has to wonder; will they fulfill it, or will they stick to the same ol’ thing like we’ve been seeing from them and countless other bands? While the former is not impossible, we should make like the music and settle for the safer of the two possibilities.
