Kittie, most people have heard of these girls, mainly because they are girls. This is their sophomore effort and I can't say they've changed for the better. They tried to make this album as heavy as possible. Perhaps to show that they're as tough as their male colleagues, who knows? But whatever made them decide, it was not a good thing to do.
What you get here is downtuned guitars and low, often uninspired riffs. Some sort of pseudo-death metal. Sure, it sounds fairly heavy and 'brutal', but the songwriting is really poor in most songs. The riffs are mostly just plain power chords played successively with hardly any creativity.
Like on the title track
'Oracle', Morgan is just shouting all over the place and the song is just boring. The vocals are probably the best part of this album though, Morgan can sing really well and she has a vicious growl. When she combines both it sounds really good. The verse of
'In Winter' is very nicely sung, but the lack of further resourcefulness kind of ruins the song. Furthermore there are some boring, overly wannabe-brutal songs in the beginning of the album.
If you want to get away with making really heavy songs, you have to have some technical skills on your instruments, or at least improve your songwriting. Strangely enough, there's a
Pink Floyd cover here as well.
'Run like Hell', it isn't as bad as you would expect, but it isn't that great either.
'Pain' and
'What I've always wanted' are decent songs, because they have some clean singing combined with harsher vocals and they actually display some decent songwriting.
'Safe' would probably be the highlight of the album, containing piano - A relief from all the mindless 'noise'- playing some horror filmish tunes and also containing only clean vocals.
As for the rest of the album, most of the songs are boring and bland and the final track goes on and on endlessly. If you want something brutal, buy some death metal albums, this band has potential, the vocals are good but the rest needs to be brushed up severely. Aside from the interesting artwork in the booklet, this album hasn't much to offer, so if you're not a big Kittie fan, steer clear from this album.
2/5
Good review as well.
