Review Summary: Definitly not the masterpiece it was hyped as, but an enjoyable listen for the mainstream rock fan
Ok, so first things first, let's get it out of the way: I like it. I think it's a good album, one of the better ones I've heard recently. Abuse my taste in music all you like, but I still enjoy listening to this thing. I haven't heard Trivium's first album, and apart from the odd single and album track here and there, I really haven't heard much off Ascendancy, so I'm coming at this with no real bias towards any of their older stuff. And no, I'm not a Metallica fan, I can't stand them at all. I'm writing this review because I have a different perspective on this album, and would like to add my two cents, not because of any desire to prove anyone wrong or start arguments, or anything like that, just to give the readers another angle on it.
Trivium burst into the mainstream a year or so back with the release of their second album, Ascendancy, which shot them to fame on the back of singles such as 'Pull Harder On The Strings Of Your Martyr' and 'Gunshot To The Head Of Trepidation'. An edited version of 'Dying In Your Arms' which had the screaming substituted for clean singing began making the rounds on music channels, furthering Trivium's popularity among younger listeners, and particularly "scene kids". With sales of Ascendancy rising, frightening amounts of touring, and several appearances at the UK's Download Festival playing alongside the likes of Metallica, Tool and Guns n Roses, the press were all over Trivium like flies to the back end of a horse. And so we come to the release of The Crusade, one of the year's most hotly anticipated releases into the metal mainstream, with more hype than virtually anything else in the last few years.
The Crusade features a blend of heavy metal style riffing, and throws in more contemporary, popular riffing styles of metalcore and vocal melodies found more commonly in bands labled "emo" such as My chemical Romance or Panic! At The Disco. The album's opener,
Ignition, is a high energy, high speed rock track that blends fast paced down-picked palm muting for the opening and verses, with a mini-breakdown riff funcitoning as a pre-chorus. Heafy's harsh vocals compliment the sound very well, and the track proceeds to shift into an unfortunately rather predictable slowed down chorus with clean vocals. A pretty little melody that sounds almost as if it were being played on a piano. Unfortunately this doesn't saving the song from being something of a let down in it's predictable structure, and the solo sounds as if whoever was playing it made an attempt at writing a melody and just ended up fretting wanking out of frustration. It's simply unimaginative and uninteresting, not even holding it's own as a mindless shred piece, let alone a well thought out solo. Despite the negatives, the song overall is catchy and bordering on memorable, and fades out with an oddly harmonised clean melody. It's nothing special, but it's still better than a lot of mainstream rock music found these days, and is an enjoyable listen if you're feeling in the mood for some mindless generic metal.
Why so much detail about the opening track? Simple: the rest of the album basically follows this blueprint all the way through. The second track,
Detonation takes a slightly approach, with thrash/metalcore riffs being prominent over the course of the first half of the track, which reaches a midway point with a rather poorly done whammy bar-fuelled solo that is rather dull and feels tacked on. From here on, the song takes a much more catchy approach, with the chorus followed by a rather nice second solo, a feasible and enjoyable bridge featuring more pseudo-thrash riffing, a third wanking solo that adds nothing at all to the song, and a final chorus rounds it off. The latter half is actually a rather enjoyable mainstream rock track, but it feels as if Trivium were trying (badly) to implement some element of prog-metal into the song, resulting in a rather mismatched song, with the latter half being almost entirely catchy vocal hooks, tacked on to the mediocre attempt at thrash which comprises it's first half. Again, if you're into more technical music (Opeth, Death, Dream Theater off the top of my head, as completely unrelated examples) you won't find much to pick out and examine here. If you're looking for a bit of solid brainless rock, there's every chance you'll find this enjoyable.
Entrance of the Conflagration and
Anthem (We Are The Fire) show off Trivium's (lack of) aptitude at naming songs, and basically follow the blueprint laid out by
Ignition. Points of note include what actually turns out to be a rather nice and melodic solo in
Entrance, although it does shift into a wankfest by the end, likely owing to Heafy taking over the end of the solo (more on this later). It still fits the songs nicely though.
Anthem also shows off some very sweet guitar skills in the solo, with more melodic passages leading into a few short bursts of full blown arpeggios, finishing with a memorable little lead melody. The same praise cannot be given to
Anthem's outro solo, however, which is again just playing at speed for the sake of it. An aboslutely piss-poor bridge in
Anthem, comprising many sing-a-long "whoa"s and "yeah"s really does sound like Trivium are just trying to appear as big and popular as possible, and almost feels rather arrogant in a way, especially as the track is the album's lead single. Apart from these points, these two tracks are simply rehashes of the opener in structure, but retain enough individuality to be listenable in their own right.
Unrepentant continues this trend, but sets intself apart with a rather interesting pre-chorus melody riff, a rather unsual sounding vocal performance in the chorus (which is very familiar, though I'm unable to place it), and a solo that contains both the enjoyable lead melodies and the somewhat tiresome random-sounding shredding. As has been stated previously, this really does become almost monotonous in how similar the tracks are in structure and sound, reminiscent of Seether's
Karma And Effect, which also featured a collection of catchy enjoyable material, but suffered due to a lack of variety in the tracks. This doesn't make the album unlistenable, but does lead to it being more background noise a lot of the time, as listeners will likely soon stop picking out individual riffs. For younger metalheads who have been jumping on the wagon with more recent releases that have found their way into metal's mainstream, such as In Flames'
Come Clarity, and to a much higher degree, Avenged Sevelfold's
City of Evil, The Crusade is definitly an enjoyable mainstream metal listen, which features enough technicality to inspire budding young guitarists, with enough vocal hooks to entice them in the first place.
I'll skip going into detail on most of the remaining tracks, but suffice to say they all both suffer from and benefit from sounding very similar to previous tracks. With the exception of the odd riff that catches the ear (
To The Rats), the odd standout vocal hook (
Contempt Breeds Contamination's chorus), or a refreshing bit of both (
Tread The Floods), the remainder of the album is very much an excercise in, to take a line from
Tread The Floods, "beating this dead horse". The solo in
Floods is the last real standout moment in the album, and it also happens to be one of the few songs in which Trivium have remembered they can use lead guitar for something other than soloing. Apart from the absolutely dire
This World Can't Tear Us Apart, which blatantly steals and slightly rehashes the melody from their most popular single off Ascendancy,
Dying In Your Arms, making for an obvious attempt at a quick cash-in, the album doesn't really have a lot point. The almost horrifying similarities between virtually all the tracks on the CD both save it from being awful, and also from being anything more than enjoyable. The eight minute instrumental,
The Crusade, is instantly forgettable, with some riffs blending into one another beautifully, but most just seeming to be thrown in at random. The vocals are all down to personal taste, often sounding like a harsh blend of James Hetfield's 'Master of Puppets' era vocals, and Phil Anselmo's trademark growl. Heafy's voice does often compliment the music perfectly. However some frighteningly bad lyrics, such as "we've found the anthem" (which makes up virtually all of
The Anthem's chorus), "so raise your voices with me, and sing this song of unity" (
The Rising's chorus, again sounding like a poor attempt at a making a sing-a-long chorus), and "for your honour, you will slaugher, every one of your daughters" (
Unrepentant's blatant Iron Maiden ripoff) often put Heafy's vocal perfomance very much in the background. Lead guitar is another flaw in the album, with verse/chorus leads almost non-existant, the guitarists only venturing higher up the fretboard specifically for solos, with some exceptions. The solos are a mixed bag, with some of them perfectly blending speed and melody for some memorable performances (
Unrepentant), but most of them falling straight into the realms of fret-wanking. From what I can gather, it's lead guitarist Corey who constructs the majority of the melodic lead passages and compliments them with some skillful sweep picking for the most part, and renouned braggart and vocalist Matt Heafy who simply tries to hit as many notes as possible.
In closing, this is most definitly NOT the new "Master of Puppets", "Powerslave", "Rust In Peace" or "Reign In Blood", or whatever the hell else it was built up to be. This really is just a slightly above-average modern metal album from a young band who are trying to prove too much rather than write good music. It really is a shame in a sense, as they obviously have a good deal of talent backing them up, it just seems to be misdirected at attempting to imitate their betters. Will hardcore metalheads who've been listening to this stuff for years find this an appealing purchase? Probably not, as it truly is a pale shdow of what has gone before it. But will it appeal to the younger metal audiences raised on bands like Atreyu, Eighteen Visions and Avenged Sevenfold find the mixture of thrash and metalcore/hardcore/whatever-the-hell-else-core an exciting, refreshing change from the current "scene"? Quite probably, and if taken with a pinch of salt, or in many cases perhaps a truckload of salt, it can be an enjoyable, mindless metal listen.
