Friendships and alliance are similar to candy, while treachery can be likened to the venom of a snake. One must keep his/her friends away and get farther away from the enemies. It's business as usual for Santa Barbara-based groove metal outfit DevilDriver on their seventh studio album, and while not inherently bad, the band's 2016 release is a sign that they're uninspired at this point. Graced with a cover planted firmly in the So Bad It's Good domain, Trust No One is all too familiar in direction and fairly predictable in execution. Some pretty cool instrumentation and Dez Fafara's decent vocals aside, DevilDriver are on autopilot here; even recent members Austin D'Amond and Neal Tiemann couldn't inject newfound life into the outfit's general sound. What bites about this is that the band's contributors could showcase that they were competent songwriters and extremely fun instrumentalists on recordings such as The Last Kind Words - and they didn't have to feel restricted by Mark Lewis, who's sitting in the producer's chair for this one as he did for DD's last two albums. Time you start working with another in the future, guys.
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