Review Summary: Booooooring.
If you’re looking for a Demon Hunter album with mind blowing riffs and originality you found the wrong album. Let’s not dig into the lyrics, it’s insipid, generic Christian “poetry” about darkness, light, Heaven, etc. Instead, let’s discuss the lack of riffs here. Bangers are few and far between, with Devotion being one of the only potentially memorable songs, due to decently catchy riffs. The rest of the album is a missed opportunity. You can especially hear their creative brain failing in Freedom Is Dead, which brings shades of Lifewar while attempting some dancey punk amongst the pretend nu-metal - it’s confused.
Exile is full of the alt metal Demon Hunter like to play when they run out of ideas. Forget death metal, there’s barely any touched on this holy ground. Riffs fit the bill but pale in comparison to their previous releases, and the fact that singing and choruses is the focus is not an excuse. The latest Alter Bridge album has more riffs that are also more creative. The guitar work here is lots of chugs and chords, so tiring and safe that it naturally produces melatonin.
Beyond the safe riffs and generic, forgettable songwriting there is also uninspired singing. This is the final nail in the coffin, a nail which truly kills Demon Hunter. The singing here is so bland, so basic that the frontman hits notes with the emotion of a stapler. I’ll go one further: he’s also loud for no reason like a printer. Ryan Clark has never sounded more bored than this, for shame.
The irony of this album sucking is there is a bit of ambition behind the release. Exile is a concept album set in the end times and Ryan wrote a comic series which explores the album’s lyrical content. Too bad the the lyrics are garbage eh? There’s also a handful of guest features which are wasted in these tedious tracks. In the end, Exile is a barely passable album, with tracks that are dull but not obnoxiously terrible.
