| Hearing where they pushed their sound with Periphery IV after stagnating a bit in Periphery III made me hopeful that they'd continue to do new things in this medium with this one. Admittedly they did do new things here, but they're god awful synth-pop things that they do NOT pull off (Silhouette and Dying Star) and feel almost like a pastiche of all the things I've grown to dislike about this genre: shoehorned, thoughtless sax solos (Wildfire), songs reaching up towards ten minutes not justifying their lengths (Dacul Gras, Zagreus), and just a general lack of atmosphere or depth in most of the songs. Spencer's voice was never a problem for me, but it was such a negative presence on this album. He has a such an obvious lack of nuance in his vocals (the over-compressed mixing on them doesn't help) that really makes the soft sections fall flat for me. Maybe I'll give it another shot in a few months, but it feels like they ran out of ideas this time around. |
