Amaranthe – Amaranthe Review
Amaranthe // Amaranthe
Rating: 0.5/5.0 — Slick, Catchy, Soulless.
Label: Spinefarm
Websites: myspace.com/amaranthemetal
Release Dates: EU: 2011.04.13 | US: 04.19.2011
Amaranthe has three vocalists. Just let that sink in for a while. From what I can tell, not one of those vocalists plays an instrument. Instead, they found three “attractive” people to do vocals for them. The first is a woman, who sounds like a pop singer (think E Type) and who I guarantee you cannot name a Slayer record. The second is a screamy dude. He’s got a beard (’cause he’s tough and angsty, you see) and he screams, but not too much (he must be very, very, very bored on stage). And then there’s the ‘power metal’ vocalist (Berg from Dream Evil) who’s just as over-produced as the chick vocalist and is there to get 14 year old girls all silly over his perfectly groomed dreadlocks. Behind them are several soulless session musicians (from Mercenary, Dragonland and Engel). Though, frankly, this is a band that is functionally made of session musicians, since integrity seems to be lacking. Continue reading
Well, we can’t be expected to love everything that comes out this year, although it seems at times like we have been. Although I really enjoyed the earlier releases by Denmark’s Mercenary (especially 11 Dreams and The Hours That Remain) and was looking forward to this release, the massive upheaval that led half the band to flee after 2009′s Architect of Lies has clearly taken its toll. After losing their drummer, keyboardist and singer, they were forced to retool and regroup and I’m sad to report that the 2011 incarnation of Mercenary is only a shadow of what it once was. While their sound always had elements of the dreaded metalcore style, it was merged with many other influences and thereby rendered tolerable. On Metamorphosis, they’ve emerged from their cocoon as a full blown metalcore-melo-death butterfly, just like the eight million others out there (I know the cover shows a phoenix but this is way closer to butterfly, trust me). Gone is the intriguing blend of death, power, thrash and progressive metal that graced their earlier material. Gone is that special something that made their songs so impactful and addictive. Now it’s generic metalcore with poppy, radio friendly choruses all day, all night. While fleeting moments of the old sound can be heard here and there, overall this is a very different entity and to these ears, a much lesser one. In fact, this is inferior to their previous work in every possible way. 
An interesting irony of modern metal right now is that while much of the underground seems to be mind-numbingly obsessed with simplicity, a lot of the stuff that is righteously called “mainstream” or that attempts to be mainstream is really getting quite technical and progressive—this is the opposite of what was happening a decade ago, really. As a guy who has really leaned in that direction for a very long time, I have to say that I have trouble being upset by this movement, and it makes me open to a lot of things that I think a lot of metal elitists would never even be willing to listen to. Across the Sun is one of those bands that I think your average death metal or black metal dude is going to take a listen to and say “Oh, fuck these guys,” and turn off. But Angry Metal Guy takes records and gives them a listen for what they are and I can say that Across the Sun‘s Before the Night Takes Us is a record chalk full of interesting music, despite some pretty glaring weaknesses. 
I’m sure most know the history of The Haunted and how they formed from the ashes of the legendary At The Gates. Despite my love for At The Gates, I never fully understood the stellar press and support The Haunted received and always felt they were one of the most overrated bands on the planet. Eventually they started to drift toward a more metalcore style and I lost the limited interest I had in them. Now they’re back with album seven Unseen and they’ve left their thrash days in the dust, probably for good. Instead, they deliver a strange, directionless mess of experimentation, emo angst, nu-metal and alt-rock. It’s clear they’re writing only for themselves and could care less what their fans expect or hope for at this point. While that’s admirable from an artistic perspective, when the results are this tedious and uninspiring, it’s both tragic and cringe-inducing. No matter how brave and creative they want to be, at the end of the day they should still be striving to write good music and they seem to have forgotten that here. 
One of the things that I consistently tell people when they give me shit (which they inevitably do) about my taste in music is that you should call a spade a spade and like what you like without apologies. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have biases, however, and one of those biases that I have is against things that can be labelled as “metalcore” or “deathcore.” Since the early aughts we’ve been plagued by shitty record after shitty record from post-hardcore entities that have been passed off on us as the next big thing and that have ultimately felt sad and tired and not good. I recently ripped into Architects, for example, for being billed as ‘reinventing metalcore and themselves,’ only to produce an epic fail of a record. 
Well, I’m not sure what I did to end up on the Angry Metal Guy’s Official Shit List™. However, his assigning me both the new Lazarus A.D. and Artas albums proves I’m on it bigtime. I can just picture AMG up there on his throne all high and mighty, laughing as he contemptuously sneers, “let him eat metalcore.” Steel Druhm does not like being on the Shit List and Steel Druhm will have his wengeance! Anyway, Riotology is the second album by Austrian metalcore/quasi-thrash bandwagon jumpers Artas. Up until now their claim to fame was a wildly ill-conceived cover of Coolio‘s “Gangsta’s Paradise” which ended up being funnier than Weird Al Yankovic‘s “Amish Paradise.” Now with Riotology they can truthfully claim recording two average metalcore albums. Hey, congrats guys! As soon as I saw the album cover which looks like a screen shot from the Assassin’s Creed video games I should have known where this was heading. The second clue I was in trouble was the band’s prominently displayed claim that they play “modern metal.” Apparently that’s record industry speak for tired metalcore by bands that yearn to be At the Gates and In Flames with poppier, radio-friendly choruses. Because I am merciful, I will now implore you all to leave this review and save yourselves. I can’t go with you however, for I must write on. 
As you can tell, my resolution for 2011 was to review more obscure and underground music that no one has ever heard of. I want you to know that this means that I am reviewing like everything I get, if it’s possible, and really I’ve had some good luck and some really fucking horrendously terrible luck. I’m going to say that Saeculum Obscurum falls on the good side of the luck barrier. I figured with a name that means “The Dark Age” and a logo by the mighty artist and logo magnate Christophe, this one deserved a fair shake at least. 
I know very little about J Pop. It’s quite popular among Swedish alternative kids (though, I might be behind since it seems like everyone’s all obsessed with South Korea now?) and I know that I can’t hear what they’re singing about (and that it makes me feel happy). But what I’ve heard is that in Japan there’s a new trend every quarter and that when that trend is done, the pop stars are done. They have a shelf-life of three months. No one takes them seriously and not a single person in the entire country would take them seriously as “artists” because, well, they’re not. They’re pop stars—engineered to sell music for kids obsessed with trends. Metal has trends—and really, people, it does—metalcore in the early 2000s was the coolest thing EVER and a bunch of bands who were all doing exactly the same thing got signed. But, of course, established labels are slow on the pick up of trends and so 4 years after the trend really started getting hot and relevant Century Media and Metal Blade started having bidding wars over metalcore bands. The year is 2011 and they’re stuck with these bands. And I can’t think of anyone who isn’t super fucking sick of this sound. But I sure as hell am. This sound had a shelf life of about.. oh, I dunno, 3 months. And it should’ve stayed there.
What the hell is THIS? A metal-core band I actually like? Impossible! Well, like may be too strong a word here but Killing the Eternal, the sixth album by Swiss metal-core mavens Cataract is much less annoying and cringe inducing than most of the metal-core I’ve been subjected to over time. Perhaps this caught me in a rare moment of good humor or maybe Cataract have learned over their long existence that their bread is buttered on the death/thrash side of things. One thing is for certain, Cataract manage to avoid many trappings of the classic “core” sound that I find so irritating and as a result, this is a fairly tolerable, and at times, even enjoyable album. 
