Videogame Review: Prince of Persia

(Originally written for IGN)
Okay, I'm gonna get this out of the way first; this game is gorgeous. The cell-shaded wonderland that this game conjures is jaw-dropping from the moment you start playing until the moment you finish. The Assassin's Creed engine has shown once again how well it can create sensational graphics, and the art direction is probably the best I've seen all year. The animation is smooth and natural looking, even when performing the most outlandish feats. The soundtrack compliments this perfectly; epic orchestral deluges which create a magnificent atmosphere.

Shame about everything else.

I'm a huge fan of the previous generation of this franchise; the fast, fluid platforming and combat that allowed instant usability but much room for experimentation and the likeable, fleshed out characters. On top of this, the sands of time system allowed challenge in the puzzles themselves and allowed the game to be forgiving yet tense and reliant on skill; I often found myself grasping for the rewind button in games I played afterwards. This Prince of Persia has replaced all of these with idiotic, uninspired gameplay mechanics which actively detract from the game.

First off, the platforming, while the strongest point of the game, is flawed on a few very basic levels. Firstly, the nimbleness and speed of the original prince's freerunning is usurped by leaden wall-scrambling and repetitive tasks which become dull after not much time. The new prince's parkour stuff is controled solely by the jump button, and the lack of a freerun button grates; the game misinterprets your commands sometimes, which, while uncommon, can sour your opinion of it given the life-or-death situations this occurs in.

Well, I say "life-or-death", but that's a slight misstatement. You cannot die in this game. You see, at all times you're accompanied by Elika, an obligatorily busty mage/sidekick/annoyingly-forced-feeling love interest who saves you whenever you're in a potentially deadly situation and transports you back to the last safe place. An obvious attempt to recreate the brilliant sands of time rewind function of the original trilogy, this system couldn't have missed the point more if they'd actively tried. Whereas the rewind allowed you to correct mistakes as they happened, never breaking flow and allowing for quick resuming of gameplay should you misstep, the new system drags you back to the beginning of the section and forces you to do what you just did again. Considering that some sections can be very challenging to finish, relying on a painfully unforgiving game engine, that "again" often becomes "again and again and again and again and again". In a game where instant death is this close at all times, this means that the pace of the game remains sluggish and dull.

Speaking of sluggish and dull, remember when you first powered up the largely-underrated PoP: Warrior Within and found that the awkward combat of PoP: Sands of Time had been replaced with a slick, fun and at-all-times badass system which flatters the player's every button press with sheer awesomeness? Me too. Unfortunately Ubisoft don't, and have instead put in place a hugely frustrating mess of a combat system which never fails to infuriate. Fighting in this game is entirely based on duels. Or rather, on quick-time events. You see, the block button in this game seems to be less about defense and more about holding your sword differently if you think it looks cooler. All the enemies have unblockable moves which they use with gleeful frequency, relying on the kind of reflex test which punish the player whenever possible. And since you don't have a health bar, whether you are hit by a blockable attack or block it will still merely result in slight knock-back, all in all making you wonder why they bothered with blocking at all when they could have been dealing with the animation issues. The Prince is robbed of all his agility and speed during these fights, choosing instead to either plod around like a retarded tortoise or utilise an evading system which doesn't actually evade attacks.

To top it off, all enemies, including horribly overused bosses, initially use the same tactics and to an extent the same moves, resulting in total monotony. When one boss started to use a DIFFERENT TACTIC, where they'd go into a stance where only one type of attack is effective, I almost cheered. Then they all started using it. And it would have become dull too, until they changed the one-attack to the Elika attack. You see, Elika is also used in combat by lobbing her at the enemy, or at least can be. I never did if I could avoid it. The attack has a delay while she leaps onto your shoulders, and this should, for the sake of balance, be okay, were she a ranged weapon, as a launched attack bloody well should be. She's not; in fact despite being able to fly, she is incredibly fussy about how far away you have to be from the enemy to use her. This means that that delay, when used in a close-range attack, makes her damn near useless. To top it all off, she can be attacked while attacking, which disables her for a while (read: about fifteen seconds, more if you're too far away, and this feature retains the truly mystifying definition of "too far away"). In a boss fight where this is a compulsory attack, the term "dick move" feels somewhat inadequate.

And the motivation for enduring this crap should be the story. The generic, predictable story; evil force spreads across land, generic grizzled badass takes it upon himself to somehow stop it. Even the "twist" is about as unexpected as gravity. The characters are terrible; Elika in particular is utterly schizophrenic; bitchy (possibly meant to be seen as a strong female character, which reveals so much about Ubisoft's idea of independant women) at first, then without warning flirty and vulnerable is a way so shoehorned in for the sake of romance that it's painful. The prince himself is best described as an utter dick, without the redeeming qualities of the equally arrogant original prince. The bosses are the only ones with character, character which remains agonizingly unexplored. The voice acting is jarringly done by none-more-yank americans, something which blighted Assassin's Creed despite only one character possessing it; here they ALL do, which, when combined with the horrible performances and terrible writing, throws you out of the experience every time a character opens his or her mouth.

I appreciate that I've compared this too much to the old games - it's still bad on its own merits - but it is very obviously trying to be PoP: Sands of Time. The "corruption" takes the place of the Sands, the visuals try to be like it, and Elika is like a completely unlikeable Farah. They even give you unlockable skins to make the main characters resemble SoT Prince and Farah, which felt a little like demanding that a new girlfriend gets the same haircut and clothes as your ex. They're claiming to have moved away from the originals, but don't have the guts to follow through with it.

This is a bad game. Not really bad, but below average in a way that a big-budget game has no right to be.

Defeater - Lost Ground EP

Christ, any hardcore reviews I post on here are going to be fucking predictable. Last December I posted how Dead Swans' last release is the best UK hardcore album ever, as well as how that's not much of a statement. You see, I can count the notable UK hardcore bands on fingers alone, and I'd be hard pushed to use more than one hand. Fuck, the only reason Public Disturbance are notable is because two of their members would go on to be in Lostprophets. The UK has practically no hardcore punk lineage - sure, bands like The Ruts provided inspiration to the liked of Black Flag and Minor Threat, but there's no real trace of the sound that would go on to define American punk for years. So let's make a bigger statement: the best US hardcore band of the last ten years is Defeater.

Now, given my long-standing love-in with This Is Hell, those words seem weird to me, but I've given it a lot of thought, and honestly, fuck This Is Hell. Fuck The Hope Conspiracy. Again, fucking blasphemy. It feels good. Let's do this again. Fuck Comeback Kid.

Wait. Stop.

No. Fuck Comeback Kid. Comeback Kid are great, but Defeater? Defeater are never going to be remembered as one of the great alternative bands ever, but they will be better than nine out of ten of them. Defeater don't have promise, because having promise implies that Defeater are not quite there yet. Well I fucking well hope they are, because the other bands in the USHC scene deserve at least a little bit of a chance to catch up.

The thing which sets Defeater apart are - and once again, I feel bad for bringing something as um-music-related up - the lyrics. You see, Defeater are storytellers. Their albums are concept albums, but not in the traditional '70s arena rock sense. Hardcore lyrics have always told stories - and make no mistake, the tales in Defeater's work may not be their stories, but they are someone's. Lost Ground tells of an African American man who, in memory of a mother who died at 42 and a father who was a soldier, joins up to the army to fight in World War II. He is wounded, and his friends all killed. Wracked with survivor's guilt, he returns hope to a world with no place for him. He becomes destitute and alcoholic, and dies alone. Every lyric is heartbreaking, every line is a tragedy in and of itself - the tale will stay with you. If any vocal mode was created to get across the anger, dejection, sorrow and injustice of such a tragic story, it's the roar of a hardcore vocalist.

And the emotion that this story lends the band shows. The real skill of the lyrics is in the details; the parallel drawn between the patriarchal machismo of traditional Americana and patriotism with the harsh reality of war that American culture tries so hard to hide is the order of the day for the first few songs, with the rest linking the contrast between the American military ideal - the soldier fighting heroically for his country - with the American military reality - lower-class young men wounded and traumatised or worse, crippled physically and emotionally for life, their lives ending destitute. Defeater's unique efforts in their lyric writing give their songs meaning beyond being mosh fodder, but make them the ones who tell the tales that need to be told, even if people don't want to hear them.

But beyond the vocals, Defeater excel equally. There are about four different drumbeats in hardcore which everyone uses, so listening to them can become wearing, but holy shit Defeater's drummer actually does new things with hardcore drums. The guitars, likewise, display musical range and dynamicism which far outstrips every one of Defeater's contemporaries. There is light and shade in their music, there are harsh, brutal pummelings that segue out of tense, muted and stunningly musically dynamic rest sections and back in again. The riffs constantly have a rough, vicious beauty to them, where the heartbreaking melodies of the guitars are born from violent, distorted riffing and the thunderous crashing drums. The bass is superlative, providing a grounded, central groove over which every other element of the music is overlaid. And what's more, the music tells the story too. The first track "The Red, White and Blues matches the protagonist's fear and inner tension with hyperactive hardcore at its best, and contrasts it with the simpler, more emotive sections which revolve around his memories of his mother and his idolisation of the father he has to hear about from his mom. on the final track, the story of the protagonist's last days of life spent busking on the streets, blues solos embelish the tale, evoking the frustration and sorrow of the African American community which drove them to create the genre, and a painful image of an old black beggar playing these solos on an ancient acoustic guitar on the streets of New York City. This is how you write music - and Defeater are operating on an entirely different intellectual level to their contemporaries.

Honestly, I don't think it's too late to call it. This is better than Anaal Nathrakh's In the Constellation of the Black Widow. This poky little EP from a band no-one's really heard of was and is the best record of 2009. This was and is the best hardcore record of the last ten years. Defeater are never going to get the praise they deserve, so they're going to have to settle for this; their Lost Ground EP is my favourite hardcore release ever.

Winds of Plague - Decimate The Weak

I don't even know why I review metalcore and deathcore anymore. I'm probably never going to review Architects, so essentially anything else in metalcore is shadows and dust, signifying nothing except that Sturgeon's Law might finally be applicable to metal, but fuck it, there must be some bands out there who can do the genre right - As I Lay Dying's template defining, Between the Buried and Me's utter fucking lunacy, Devil Sold His Soul's damn-near-everything.

Deathcore, similarly, has some bands which actually stick by the very simple starting template and do it well, but they're all from the period where deathcore was only just starting, since every band made since consists almost entirely of creatively dead scene kids. You want a checklist of potentially good deathcore? Here we go. Did they form in 2006 or earlier? [  ] Do they routinely wear merch from "proper" death metal bands? [  ] Do they actually sound like they've been influenced by first-wave metalcore and death metal, as opposed to second-wave metalcore and other deathcore bands? [  ] Do they, god forbid, actually introduce an innovative element? [   ] And all of these boxes are ticked by Winds of Plague. Perhaps Decimate the Weak will interest me.

"Decimate" is one of those words which is very rarely used correctly, like "disinterested" (which means "unbiased" or "without vested interest") or "crescendo" (It's the BUILD UP PEOPLE, NOT THE CLIMAX ITSELF). It's like how people who want to seem more cultured than they are think that "star-crossed lovers" means something other than "utterly doomed, totally fucked-by-fate lovers". Basically everyone takes it to mean "Destroy", "maim" or "obliterate", but what it actually means - and I've only ever seen Doctor Who use it correctly - is "to destroy one tenth of something". This is ironic for me, because it was only during the first tenth of this album that I thought I might like it, because up to that point, it was actually pretty good. Forget deathcore, this is symphonic, epic metalcore. The prominent keyboards (handled MUCH better than Abigail Williams' keyboard sections) built a bombastic atmosphere counterbalanced by the midrange screams of...ugh...Johnny Plague. The guitars break from metalcore convention by actually having leads and solos. Take note metalcore kiddies; leads and solos are AWESOME. USE THEM. If you're not talented enough to do so, you're in the wrong game. The melodic work is great, with the instruments playing off of one another ease, working in perfectly locked harmony. And, my god, how refreshing is it to hear a metalcore band who doesn't sound exactly like At The Gates? The first proper song reaches the quarter mark, and the song softens, and then stops.

Then a pig-squeal adorned breakdown begins.

And we were doing so well.

If I remember correctly, when I first heard that bit I actually shouted "WHAT THE FUCK?" at my computer screen. Seriously, I've never heard such an out of place, unneeded breakdown EVER. I don't mind breakdowns, but I didn't want the song I liked to stop like that, let alone turn into the song it now was.

The rest of the album was soured for me. This band is superb when it's doing its power-metalcore thing, and its integration of keyboards into their sound is superb - and indeed, exactly how it should be done. It is, however, far too eager to jump at the opportunity to abandon that for the sake of doing what all their contemporaries are doing - dull breakdowns. Sometimes, and I have to stress sometimes, the keyboards save the breakdowns from utter monotony, which is a credit to how good they are, but they're the only thing doing anything interesting on this album.

That's not to say that the other elements are bad. The guitars are fantastic when they're not content to just chug, and have some superb riffs and leads in there. The opening riff of "Decimate the Weak" (the song) is almost Nile-esque. But they're dull! The drums are exemplary deathcore drumming, but that's part of the problem - they're an utterly standard example of deathcore drumming. They're dull! And the bass? I'm amazed they even have a bassist. I actually want to hear a remaster of this were the bass guitar is removed. I doubt anyone would ever be able to tell. I wish more people would have the guts Pig Destroyer do and just get rid of a bassist if you're not going to use one.

This is by no means terrible - I've heard worse deathcore. There are some REALLY good parts here, but their willingness to abandon those parts is just frustrating, and that frustration with them overshadows their good elements. Pick it up if you have the patience I don't and you could have a lot of fun with this album - but I can't do any more pig squeals and chugging.

Comic review: Phonogram/Suburban Glamour

                On with my journey to experiment with reviews of non-music mediums. It may not be more fun for you, but it is for me, so it's going to keep happening. Enjoy!

                Okay, so something I've been getting back into these days is comics. I was never really out of the comic-buying habit, what with my warped and depraved love of Hellblazer and the fact that I re-read Watchmen every few months, but this wave of comic-love has brought my enjoyment of the medium up to an all-time high. I'm reading Batman from 1986 back up to present day, because if there's one thing I know about current writer Grant Morrison, it's that if I don't know every twist and turn the narrative has taken since the Crisis on Infinite Earths he'll bend my comprehension of the plot over a rail and show me just how welcome I am in his continuity porn kingdom. I've also gotten kind of into independent comics, which all started with the Scott Pilgrim series, the standard for indie comics. Long story short, it's utterly brilliant and it's led me up an avenue of non-traditional comics. And this had me end up with Phonogram.

                Now, I run a blog in which I discuss videogames and horror movies and complain about music, so it's safe to say that I am inescapably awesome. However, this was not always the case. In my first few years of secondary school, my friends and I would hang out in the library, chatting, relaxing, and reading Official Playstation 2 Magazine, which - for some reason - the library had a subscription to. Pretty much the only thing that stuck with me of this magazine was the cartoons in the back, Save Point, which where brilliant. It was wonderfully written, illustrated in a style I always admired, and always containing at least one hot punk girl, which probably explains my long-running kink for alt-chicks. Fast-forward four or five years, and I've long since stopped buying OP2M, and though my friends and I still hang out in the library a lot, we're all infinitely prettier. My absolute writing hero is a man called Kieron Gillen, long time contributor to PC Gamer, creator of superb PC gaming site Rock Paper Shotgun and, it just so happens, sometimes crazy-talented comic book writer. As I got more into comics, I had a look at his.

                One series stood out amongst his contributions to Marvel Comics which, as an avowed DC, I was never going to read. It was called Phonogram, published by Image Comics with an illustrator called Jamie McKelvie, based around the idea of music and magic being analogous - you can see why it would appeal to me. The first issue of the first volume is available online, and, curious, I had a read. It was sublime: wonderfully written, illustrated in a warmly familiar style and containing just the right amount of hot punk girls. I'd like to say that realisation slowly dawned upon me, but being kind of a slow fuck at times, I only realised having poked around Gillen's website and explicitly being told; this duo was the exact same one who made Save Point, the comic strip I remembered after all these years. I'd grown up with Phonogram. I just hadn't realised it.

                An aside - Image Comics, for those of you not in the know (I'm assuming all of you) was formed in the early 90s by, amongst others, an illustrator called Todd MacFarlane. With its flagship title, Spawn, it spearheaded the grim 'n' gritty revolution of that decade, where the industry as a whole tried as hard as possible to appeal to teen boys. Everything was EXTREME and EDGY and TOTALLY RADICAL without even pretence to emotional or thematic depth. Fuck, DC even made a whole new imprint, Vertigo, just so people like Brian Azzarello, Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman didn't get any intelligence in the SUPER AWESOME image the main imprint was working so hard to cultivate. This decade is the reason no-one buys comics anymore. Good stuff WAS made in this era - the Knightfall saga of the Batman mythos got me into comics, and of course most of The Sandman was made here, but for the most part, this was a hyping up and dumbing down of a medium which still hasn't commercially recovered, even though artistically it's pretty much back on par. Image Comics have been an in-joke amongst comic fans entirely for this era, synonymous with vacuous insubstantiality. So you see why it's weird to have such a smart, culturally aware series on here.

               The first volume of Phonogram, Rue Britannia, introduces us to our first Phonomancer, David Kohl. A charismatic, commanding vagabond, he makes music his power, using it for whatever he wants. He's a phonomancer - a magician who draws power from songs. Put on a mission from the Feminine Principle, he discovers that events of the past are changing, altering the future, and it all revolves around the long-dead Britannia, the spirit of Britpop. The actual text itself is a sprawling, Hellblazer-esque journey through Britain's musical landscape, constantly writhing with allusion and metaphor, with Kohl trying to stop what is happening to Britannia before his musical identity, rooted in the life and death of Britpop, disappears completely, taking with it his phonomancy.

                Of course, the more interesting element is the subtext - the function of every part of this magical side is analogous to the way music affects people. A "phantom" of a past era can be revisited by getting suited and booted in the style, turning on era-music, and tuning out, slipping into memories of the time. Musical revivals become literal revivals of dead genre deities, attempting to rewrite history to give old music new legs, allowing nostalgia to make people young again. This is music and magic as metaphysics, with the effects of music on the mind changing the world around it. Gillen writes in a manner that intertwines these two layers inextricably, creating a narrative which requires full comprehension of both. No other comic, no matter how sophisticated, has managed this synthesis quite this well. The constant referencing of real-life bands (to the point where a glossary is needed, and supplied with biting commentary from the creators themselves) creates a silent soundtrack for the comic, weaving constant strands of allusion through lyrical themes, contextual cues and recurring references. The idea of music-as-magic is explored on the magic side perfectly.

                The second volume, The Singles Club, changes this tack entirely. Set over a single night at an indie club, we're introduced to a near-entirely new cast (David Kohl, his femme fatale friend, and his Chas Chandler copy, Kid-With-Knife, return) and the events of the evening examine them as characters, again, using music as an interface for strange goings on. The "magic" is more casual here - not even explicitly magical, even - but the point here is on the relationships between people and the music they love. Each issue tells the night's story from a different perspective, and this is utilised wonderfully. The best use of this? A single line, brutally cruel in the first issue, heartbreaking in the next. You’ll see what I mean.

                The artwork is astonishing. The first volume is black and white, but the stunning art of Jamie McKelvie brings it to life nonetheless. It hangs out on the iconic corner of the Scott McCloud realistic-artistic-iconic triangle, and this suits it perfectly. The lack of painstaking detail allows the crisp, stripped-down art style to express astonishing emotion – Kieron Gillen may be the writer, but Jamie McKelvie can tell stories without a single word. The characters are so expressive and so alive with feeling and action that even in the second volume, where a character may only feature in two or three issues, they have such astonishingly deep characterisation that it's all the time they need. The character design is brilliant too, making each character unique while still making them seem like real people. The events of the night give insight into the workings of their minds which display a rich understanding of why people love music, and every element of the comics production, be it the writing, the art or the superlative colouring (only The Singles Club is in colour) converges on this point. Phonogram is a truly brilliant comic.

Once I had read this (I have still yet to read the final chapter of The Singles Club) I found that McKelvie had written and drawn his own comic, Suburban Glamour. Naturally, I had to give it a read. The verdict? Less brilliant. The story revolves around a seventeen year-old rock chick called Astrid, who's quickly outgrowing her midlands hometown. As her discontent with her hometown grows, her childhood friends reappear. They bring with them a supernatural world, and a conflict to which Astrid is connected. If anything, this comic is a stunningly well done insight into the teenage mind, which makes it slightly irrelevant to me, who, being a teenager, can do that by hanging out with my friends for a half hour, but it's brilliantly portrayed. Every character is relatable, every element of the "normal" situations is familiar, and the spirit of both modern teens and adolescence in general is captured perfectly.

Unfortunately, the supernatural side of it, and the "main" story this brings, is much less well-developed, vastly less intelligent than the rest of the story warrants, and a total injustice to the world it sets up. It fits the idea of the story, sure, but the when the subtext and the text aren't just interwoven, but are the same thing, something's gone wrong. The plot ends up ending without any real climax, but merely trundling along like a filler strip in a longer-running comic before simply stopping without actually having gone anywhere (only having 4 issues is no excuse considering that The Dark Knight Returns had the same amount of space and helped revolutionise comics). This may be intentional, given the subject matter, but the comic feels too small, like the seeds of something much bigger have been planted, but haven't grown, and end without any real revelation or point gotten across. The art and design of the comic is as gorgeous as ever, but it lacks the tight direction that Gillen's scripts gave Phonogram, and as such lacks much of the weight it carried before. All this said, it was okay purely for the bits in-between the main story arc, which will be both relatable to teens and insightful to adults. Also, Astrid is added to my list of alt-chick comic book crushes along with Death from The Sandman and Nico Minoru of Runaways. Go her.

Phonogram's intelligent, rich narrative and superlative presentation makes it possibly my favourite comic in recent years, and makes both volumes an essential read to any comic fans. Suburban Glamour was equally sharp in its appearance, but lacks both the substance and the simple fun to match up to it. Still, McKelvie can be forgiven seeing how awesome he is as an artist, and Gillen remains on the pedestal I've put him on over the years.

Annotations of an Autopsy - II: The Reign of Darkness

If anyone asked me for advice on how to write reviews, my first action would be to ask them why the fucking hell they were asking me, a nobody with a free blog who peddles mostly self-depreciating jokes about his own misanthropy, but assuming they fanned my ego the necessary amount, I'd tell them "If you review something that you've already made your mind up on, your review is going to suck and stay sucky." This is why the vast majority of people who review on Encyclopaedia Metallum are such utter fuckscoffs - they knew what they were going to say about Parkway Burns The Prada-wearing Prom Queen or whatever other generic metalcore band, or about Frostbitten Grimkvlt and their black metal buddies before they started writing - something largely along the lines of "Booo, they're just like all the other metalcore bands I hate!" and "Yay, they're just like all the other black metal bands I love!" respectively.

This is why I don't review death metal. You see, I fucking love death metal, and the fact is that the template for mainstream death metal is so vividly refined that it's hard to make it sound anything other than good, though God only knows some bands have tried. I could write a review for the new Immolation and the new Nile, and they'd both read similarly - these are bands I already love, doing what they do best. There's no actual development here, and that's okay because what they do, they take pretty much to its inevitable conclusion. So lets see a death metal band that I DO have something new to talk about.

My favourite gig I ever went to was in a tiny venue in Brighton, attended by about 40 people, where me and a few of my friends saw three of the rising stars of British extreme metal - Viatrophy (R.I.P), Trigger the Bloodshed, and Annotations of an Autopsy. To call this gig "intimate" was an understatement - the front row of the crowd was ME. I actually ended up apologising to the bands on behalf of Sussex for such a shitty turnout because I felt kind of bad for them. However it did rule. The bands didn't half-ass it at all, and, upon meeting them, it turned out they were all lovely guys. I'm saying this as, I suppose, some kind of wierd full disclosure things, because I want you to know that I already liked Annotations of an Autopsy. A friend and I have matching t-shirts we got when we pre-ordered our copies of their debut. However, while what they were doing before - sludgy slam-influenced deathcore, which figured out that the only way to stop breakdowns interrupting the pace of the song was to keep the song at a low tempo anyway - was all very well and good, their sudden change in a traditional death metal direction shouldn't come as a surprise - not least because given that Job For A Cowboy, Trigger the Bloodshed, The Faceless and Through the Eyes of the Dead have all made the same move, you'd have to be pretty slow on the uptake not to at least weigh up the odds. One unfortunate symptom of this is the loss of their awesome ultra-distorted logo in favour of one that looks like it was potato-printed, and keep in mind that these motherfuckers brought this kind of logo back in. An upside is the involvement of ERIK FUCKING RUTAN as the mixer, who has quickly become the no. 1 name in death metal production, overtaking...well, Tue Masden or Colin Richardson, I guess, though there hasn't really been a decent big-name DM producer since Scott Burns quit, but whatever.

Anyway, the new sound is quite something. Considering the sludge influence they one had, it's not surprising that AoaA's tempos on this album, II: The Reign of Darkness, are very varied, and this is something that they're very good at - they can even keep tempo down while playing quickly, which is saying something. This is mostly thanks to superlative drummer Lyn Jeffs, who has buggered off to not-nearly-as-good slamcore band Ingested since this came out, whose drumming is the driving force behind AoaA's music. He keeps the pace of the songs reined in with force, and the whole CD hinges on his performance. Fortunately, he's awesome. Blasts are never overused, fills gel seamlessly with the standard rhythm-keeping beats, and his double-bass drumming is superb - damn near mechanical in its accuracy, though the drums themselves sound clicky enough to betray the use of triggers, which detracts from his man-points somewhat. This is a guy who knows exactly how his bands need his drumming to sound, and he pulls it off fantastically.

The guitars are also great. They're usually going fast, even during slow sections, and give a way a great deal of technical ability, especially during the tastefully used soloing sections. The riffs themselves have a superb sense of melody, never sinking to the death metal cop out of falling back on atonality. They always feel like they're developing, and changing the course of every song. There is a strong atmospheric feel to this album as well, which comes from the melodic elements and gives the album an intense character. It's the same doomy feel as their debut Before the Throne of Infection had, but without the obvious doom influence of that record, and it works very well. The breakdowns are much less metalcore-inspired this time round, but every so often falling back into the old reliance on the bass drop, which they still at least do better than a lot of bands. The vocals are higher and less gurgled than before, which is to say that they're now as low and gurgled as a regular death metal vocalist, and there's no trace of the unremarkable slam death rumble that vocalist Steve Regan adopted the first time round.

All this said, Annotations of an Autopsy never have a defining moment here, a particular riff or section which captures the imagination - there's not really a need, since their signature song, Sludge City, has more of this than most bands manage in a career. There is one thing to be said for deathcore that death metal finds much harder to do - memorable moments, like a decent chorus or breakdown. There are moments on this album which stand out, but nothing that grabs you and refuses to let go. For all its re-imagined sophistication, AoaA had, in their dramatic, slow riffs, unparalelled use of gang vocals and sludgy breakdowns, real punch-the-air moments which were unequivocably AoaA moments which defined them and placed them in the hearts of extreme metal fans. They come close - the solo in opener In Snakes I Bathe is the kind of solo they did so well on the last album's Years of Disgust. But no-one remembers the solo in Years of Disgust. They remember the big fuckoff breakdown after it, and I can't help but think that this album is lacking in that kind of memorability.

Nonetheless, while it won't set the world on fire, it is a great contemporary death metal release from a band who show a lot of promise when they're not aching with their desire to be another band. At times, that band takes the helm, and it's them you'll want to listen to.

The Agonist - Once Only Imagined

Right, this is a big review for me. For too long, this has been easy - ripping new arseholes in bands that desparately need one to get rid of all the shit piling up in their albums or showering with praise anything which can make me call them "the Opeth of - ". Which is why this review is where everything before has been heading and everything after will come from. I'd call it my Crisis On Infinite Earths if I thought you were geeky enough to understand what they hell I was talking about. The question is simple: What happens when I WANT to like a crappy album?

First off, let me explain this dilema by saying some things about myself. I'm Alex. I live in Eastbourne, a town in the south of England. I'm seventeen. And I LOVE alt girls. Essentially I go for the "pretty" aesthetic in girls, but a sexy rock chick would make me trample cute geek girls by the dozen if they got in the way. You know, the type with dyed black hair and snakebite piercings and tattoo sleeves that finish on the chest. The kind of girl that Suicide Girls and Burning Angel practically subsidise the production of. And it's not like in metal we're left wanting for these lovely ladies - between Maria Brink and Marta Pedersen we're pretty much covered. However, a bunch of my friends and I were round my friend Sam's house flicking between all of the two rock tv stations the UK has to offer when we saw a music video featuring a distictly female singer. Having missed the first few seconds of the video, we didn't know who it was, and it was fairly badly lit, so we couldn't really see her, but fellow sad teen Joey and I fucking insisted on watching it through to the end because five words were going through our heads: "Google Image, safe search off". What followed was five or so minutes of distinctly average metalcore, at the end of which we found that the band was called The Agonist, though admittedly, the whining of everyone in the room who wasn't a straight male was compensated for by the fact that it just so happens that the singer of the band was literally my perfect woman. Her name is Alissa White-Gluz. LOOK AT HER.

LOOK

AT

HER

Jesus fucking Christ, it doesn't even matter of you're a woman or a gay guy, there must be SOMETHING there that you can at least appreciate. I mean, seriously, I don't know any graceful or poetic way to put what I feel here, so I'm just going to tell you that the things I would do to this woman would get us both hanged in Idaho. And she's a pretty good vocalist too! Her growls are kind of a halfway point between Angela Gossow and the guy from Heaven Shall Burn and she has a genuinely good singing voice! She seems pretty smart too - her lyrics are socio-political stuff advocating animal rights and criticising the right wingers! And look at the back of her hand in the first picture! That's an X! She's straight-edge! So am I! Most of you will never have any idea how fucking sexy that makes her to the rest of us! It's a good thing I'm so fucking horrible with women, because I'm not sure that a real human could match this.

And yet the album, Once Only Imagined, is kind of lame.

I'll start at the beginning. There's an intro which I suspect they were cheap enough to just distort one of the pre-existing songs to make, before it goes into the first song, titled "Rise and Fall". Yes, this is metalcore so generic you've even heard the song titles before. The metalcore type of choice is American melodeath-inspired first-wave, and you can practically hear the disk straining to turn into an All That Remains album. They do some interesting things with time signatures, and then it goes into the most standard, drop-D verse-clean chorus-breakdown combo I've ever heard. You've heard this all before, people. It's less safe and overcommercialised than, say, The Devil Wears Prada or August Burns Red, and not as breakdown orientated as metalcore has become ever since the melodeath influence was scrapped in favour of chugging, but it's all stuff I've heard done as well before. Have you ever listened to As I Lay Dying or All That Remains? Well, add a heaping helping of Heaven Shall Burn and insert singing sections that, again, are actually pretty good, and you have this. Everything is ticked on the checklist, and in its correct place, with not an interesting new element added. But, hey, evolution is as good as revolution, so let's adjust our expectations and move on.

The vocals themselves are fairly standard. There's no doubt that Alissa can growl, but The Agonist is a real band and they do have a record contract, and she's their vocalist, so if that's a fucking achievement then the bar's dropped lower than I'd realised. Her singing itself is tuneful and quite nice, but it's very nasal and just a tad overused, so it isn't as much of a pleasant change when it is present. It seems to me to be more of an issue of songwriting than of the performance itself, but I'm not sure whether that's the case or that I'm just worried that actual criticism will destroy whatever chance I had of being invited to her birthday party.

The guitars display some good riffs and occasionally a trill or little flourish that promises a surprising degree of technical ability, but overall they're too content to languish in mediocrity, chugging away in palm-muted open chords or strumming powerchords to back Alissa's clean vocals. The drums are so mind-bogglingly perfuctory it's untrue. Seriously, well-done drums are something I really enjoy, and there was no moment on this album where they attracted my attention. It's just so frustrating to hear a band unable to take the songwriting risks they can obviously pull off for the sake of fear or laziness.

All that said, it's still well done. The whole package comes together as something hampered by inexperienced, unambitious and unimpressive songwriting, but the actual performances have value in and of themselves in that they actually have promise. As it is, this CD being their debut, it's still a worthy pick-up for metalcore fans.

Wait. Stop. No. It's happened. It's fucking happened. I actually described the premise for this review to a friend by asking "What's the one thing that can convice a teenage boy to abandon professionalism, journalistic integrity, personal safety...?" and he instantly replied "Boobs". That's what happened. Well I'm no longer going to pretend that this is functional as an album. Every fucking metalcore album released from Massachausets from 2000 to 2006 does this better. The harmonised leads, the breakdowns, the harsh-vocal-verse, clean-vocal-chorus structure, it's the same shit you've heard a thousand times unless you've been living under a rock or just have the attention span of a retarded goldfish. Listen to Shadows Fall while watching a Burning Angel porno and you've got everything this album could possibly offer you done pretty much as well.

p.s. It makes me laugh that this band is signed to Century Media who, judging from their signing of In This Moment, Iwresteledabearonce, Lacuna Coil, Arch Enemy and Winds of Plague, are trying to get as many female-containing metal bands as possible, probably so they can throw a party just so the members of Turisas can lose their virginities.

p.p.s Holy shit, The Agonist's follow up, Lullabies of a Dormant Mind is actually really good. It's experimental, adventurous and dramatic, and every performance has improved. It does new things with metalcore, combining it with jazz, classical, and symphonic metal, adding progressive elements and occasionally breaking out into wonderfully technical riffage. It's better written, it's better done, it's pretty much everything I hoped this album would be, though Alissa's warbling still needs to be reined in more. Nonetheless, it's high-quality enough that I have an excuse to watch their music videos over and over again in slow motion.

A film review - Behind the Mask: the Rise of Leslie Vernon

I'm very, very glad that I'm too young to have been into horror movies during the 90's self-aware horror wave headed up by Scream and fortunately culled in the form of Freddy vs. Jason. The idea was pretty similar to the recent wave of pseudo-realistic zombie fiction a la The Zombie Survival Guide, where the humour comes from the assumption that we're in on all the in-jokes, without wanting any of the genuine enjoyment that the more sincere genre films inspire. They simply weren't pitching to horror fans, but to people who've read about horror tropes somewhere. They were pitching to those who like the ironic.

And let me get this straight - I FUCKING HATE THE USE OF IRONIC PSEUDO-PARODY. I genuinely like the main riff of Blur's Song #2, and the excessive, overdistorted heaviness, even though it's a pisstake of the grunge scene. Does that make me dumber than the people who listen to it just to feel better than people who actually own a Nirvana CD? Honestly, I couldn't care less, I'm having much more fun with that song than that Pitchfork-reading bastard is, so fuck him.

I mean, I get why a media property would do it's thing in that really self-aware way, because it means that if they fuck up they didn't really fail, it was all just part of the joke, but it also means that it can't really be genuinely enjoyed, because if you do you shouldn't have been watching it to start with. In something where the appeal is as embarassingly juvenile as in horror, this essentially makes your initial market the butt of the joke in hopes of winning over a periphery demographic of hipster fucks. Fortunately, Behind the Mask: the Rise of Leslie Vernon knows its market much better.

Initially billed as a mockumentary of an aspiring slasher villain's preparation for his big first-slaughter night, the film follows a student journalism team documenting the rise of everyday guy, magnificent bastard and wannabe serial killer Leslie Vernon - his home, his psychological mindgames with the lampshadingly generic virginal "survivor girl" and his prepataion for the upcomic killing spree. It's presented in the typical tongue-in-cheek mode we've seen since Spinal Tap, and it has a lot of fun, from certain laugh-out-loud one-liners to the knowing, head-nodding amusement of acknowledging of all the old cliches, like its on a big checklist. The fun a roomful of horror moguls will have with the first and second acts of this film is worth the price alone. There's even a superb line in Leslie explaining the behind-the-scenes action, and the tricks of the trade.

And in the third act, all this is traded in for a total change of pace that both subverts classic slasher features and plays them gleefully straight. This section is for the horror fans - those of us that want to laugh at the over-the-top gore, but still want over-the-top-gore, who want the sex scene to be let to go on a little bit longer than necessary, but also find the lampshade-hanging hilarious. It makes fun of all the slasher stuff, but it also revels in it; it repsects that yes, this stuff is absurd, but it's exploitation, it's enjoyable, it's just damn fun, like when Shaun of the Dead spent its last twenty minutes going totally for broke with absolute sincerity, or how Spinal Tap's songs are actually kind of cool, as well as being spot-on parodies of 70's rock. The movie section of this film rules in the same way that, for a split second, when Jason freezes that woman's head and smashes it on the work top, Jason X was actually worth watching because for a moment it replaced its smirk with a genuine grin of glee. There's even a twist I didn't see coming! (and yes, it's very depressing that that's a big deal when I'm seventeen)

Behind the Mask: the Rise of Leslie Vernon is not serious, but it's totally committed to being both so tongue-in-cheek as to give dental deformation and utterly committed to creating something totally, genuinely, fist-pumpingly awesome. It's not winking at everyone else in the cinema while you eke genuine fun out of what's on screen, it's slasher horror by numbers and, it fucking wallows in it, as opposed to Scream's merely dipping its toes in for the sake of inclusion, like in the end it would have met all its goals was the horror movie riffing replaced with, I dunno, "inspirational" sports movies. If you're a horror fan, and you know a whole bunch of other horror fans, the night in this movie will give you is worth the RRP, let alone the ridicuous mark-down that Amazon is currently asking for. BUY IT.

Bleed From Within - Humanity, and the UK metalcore scene

Okay, before the review proper begins, I'd like to quickly shed the casual readers: this band sounds like The Black Dahlia Murder with Bring Me The Horizon breakdowns in it. Now, a certain percentage of you will be tasting vomit in the back of your throat and around the cracks in your teeth. You can go now. You're excused. From that one sentence, a certain subset of you now know you'll hate this album, and you don't need to know any more. Go listen to the new Dark Funeral, it's superb.

Right. Now I was going to make a giant end-of-2009 review blow-out of dozens of mini reviews - not, you understand, an "end of decade" list, though everyone's talking about this decade like it's about to end and as such, I've been being as utterly insufferable as possible in pointing out that since there was no Year 0, the decade finishes at the end of 2010 and the new one begins in 2011 (This also means you all celebrated the beginning of the 21st Century in the WRONG FUCKING YEAR, RETARDS) - containing a paragraph on every major release of the year and retrospectives on previous reviews. However, this is taking fucking ages, and while I may just finish it someday, probably by 2011, I realised around about the time I was grasping for an excuse to not finish it, that it was missing the point of this blog. I'm not one for just saying good things about the latest well known releases - let's be honest, you already know how you feel about Crack The Skye, so the last thing you need is my opinion taking up space in your empty little minds - but for ripping the shit out of bad albums you've heard of and praising great albums you probably should have heard of. The enormo-review may one day surface, but screw it, a new year just means a slightly different date, so out with the hysteria and on with some scene-setting.

If we have anything to thank metalcore and deathcore for - besides Winds of Plague bringing us all the exquisite Alana Potocnik, who continues the perpexing trend of every woman in metal being at least a "would-after-a-beer-or-two", to our attention - it's that it's gone a long way towards revitalising the UK metal scene. Let's be honest guys, the period of time between the creation of grindcore and the rise to prominence of Bullet For My Valentine was a fallow period for UK alternative music - the country that once birthed Iron Maiden, Carcass and - depressingly - Venom, had to sit and watch as America and Mainland Europe got thrash, death metal, black metal, melodeath and first-wave metalcore. Now, thanks to Bullet, Bring Me The Horizon and Architects, we're back competing on the world stage, and the underground is rife with young, hungry bands snapping at the heels of the American lot - at this point, the european scene might as well not exist in the world of modern metal - in the fields of metalcore and deathcore.

Of course, metalcore has yet to convince one half of the traditional metal community that it still is artistically relevant and the other that it ever was in the first place, and deathcore is still the unwanted child of the alternative music hick trailer, begging only for love as said community puts yet another cigarette out on it's face purely because it was closer than the ashtray, but in the UK, as far as the average young metal fan is concerned, metalcore was only invented four years ago, probably by Oli Sykes and those other guys that follow him around - yes, rest of world, whether we like it or not, Bring Me The Horizon are LITERALLY THAT VITAL TO THE CREATION OF THE NEW UK METAL SCENE - and as such, here, since we haven't had to put up with it for ten years like the US scene has, it's still fresh and interesting. Yes, there is something horribly wrong with a scene that champions Parkway Drive as fresh and interesting, but roll with it.

So of the up-and-coming bands that populate the UK scene, the majority are all coming from the same place - second-wave metalcore, as influenced by other second wave metalcore, so when Bleed from Within rose up in 2007 on the value of being excellently done...well...second-wave metalcore, it took...well...no-one by surprise.

That tale was much more inspiring in my head.

Anyway, what I loved about Bleed From Within was that they looked like a proper death metal band with a frontman who could be Mr. Sykes' twin, and brilliantly, this sums up the band perfectly. Singer Scott Kennedy gives high, back-of-throat howls and occasional full-throated roars. The guitars riff like every darkly melodic metal band since At The Gates, and the drums either blast or thud along at a thrash pace, occasionally stopping for the usual rent-a-breakdowns. You've heard this before, people, but the clincher is that it's not badly done at all. The innovation, complexity or quality of the riffs never really rise to a level which would earn them the kind of admiration that, say, Sylosis readily deserve, but the actual melody is fairly well composed and the influence of The Black Dahlia Murder actually helps them separate out from the crowd. And yes, in this case, "influence" is shorhand for "blind, pandering hero worship", but fuck it, when every other fucking band on your scene draws "influence" from a bunch of twatty As Blood Runs Black-aping fuckscoffs, drawing inspiration from a halfway decent band can be what gives a good band a great sound. Unfortunately, this still isn't a great album, or even a good one.

Okay, so considering "riffs written in the music classes of special schools" is the standard for guitar work in second-wave metalcore, BFW should probably be given some kind of medal for not just chugging through the entire album, but even so, beating a shitty standard has never been an impressive goal, doubly so when the last band in the British scene to play this kind of music and still manage this were, you guessed it, Bring Me The Horizon. The overarching musical pieces the songs represent are perfectly functional, but there's no real character here - the riffs are quickly-picked blocks of simple melody without inspiration, the drums just kind of happen. The instrumental performances don't really aspire to do more than the absolute minimum so, fittingly, they employ breakdowns by the bucketload. These are, admittedly, reasonably well done breakdowns, but as is the norm with the modern metal scene, they're overdone to the point of tedium, and for a musical section designed to inspire enthusiasm, this kind of misses the point. The songs themselves do the job, and don't really attempt more. I want to be able to say there's potential here, but honestly, I can't hear it. This is dull music at it's most dire.

There's a reason that Bring Me The Horizon have come up so many times in this review, and it's a reason we'd be remiss to forget - that prior to the avalanche of shite that was Suicide Season, they were really fucking good. Count Your Blessings can't be flawed for it's great riffs, varied vocals and reliable drums, and it's only real problem - the over-reliance on open-string breakdowns - is one that they at least did better than all the other bands for whom this is a problem. Humanity attempts to equal these elements, but it ultimately fails because whereas BMTH's musicianship is equaled by their passion, Bleed From Within simply play the kind of bland, uninspired metal of a band whose enthusiasm far outstrips their artistic vision.

Dead Swans - Sleepwalkers

Thanks to my new metal mag of choice, Terrorizer, and I say "thanks" in the same way that a child says "thanks" to the grandma that made him a sweatshirt of industrial twine and razorblades for Christmas, I've become aware of the blog Metal Inquisition, which attempts to refine the medium of music snarkery to an art form, and at this point I'd like to say that I DEFINATELY HAD NEVER READ IT BEFORE THIS BLOG WAS STARTED. It's an entertaining read because beneath the complete contempt for justified opinions and constant gushing over obscure-to-unimportant '80s thrash, the entire blog is essentially a portrait of Sergeant D, the world's saddest man, his contempt for the world and triggered double kick drums a mere cover for his desire for people to value him. I have an image in my mind of a fat guy in a Devourment t-shirt hunched over his keyboard, tears streaming down his face as he types hatespeech with one hand, his other jammed down the front of his shorts as he sweatily masturbates to the MySpace photos of the fifteen year-old scene girls that fawn over BrokeNCYDE.

It suddenly occurred to me that this may well be me in twenty years time.

"No!" I said to myself, proudly holding my 50/50 good-bad ratio aloft like lion cubs in a Disney movie, "Cynicism has yet to take me! And also, no thanks, fifteen year-old girls!” I then spent a day in Brighton with a group of friends criticising everything they like, see and are. Maybe I was right the first time. Eventually one of them actually screamed at me, "Is there anything you like?!?" and confronted with the challenge that I am in fact incapable of feeling love, I actually had to think for a moment. I love webcomics, and gameboy music, and also my friends, I guess, but whatever. But yes, I'm a changed man, and I'd like to talk about something I love.

I have officially listened to "Thinking of You", the first track off Dead Swans' new album "Sleepwalkers" more times on my current iTunes library than any other song. I may well love it more than any other song on there. It is what Dead Swans are; a highly concentrated, utterly refined explosion of everything that makes hardcore great. Imagine the hyperactive hardcore punk offered up by This Is Hell combined with the intensity and brooding textural elements of The Hope Conspiracy. We're talking thoughtful, dissonant guitar soundscapes that burst into racing, soaring melody. We're talking vocals spat from the pit of the soul and roared at an imagined crowd screaming every word back. We're talking that crash-snare-crash-snare drum pattern that anywhere else would be oversimplified but in hardcore works because dammit the important thing is that they're hitting the drums really fucking hard because that means they care or something. Every hardcore trope they use, they play totally straight because if they didn't mean every second of it, it wouldn't be nearly as brilliant.

Anyway, if you could understand any part of that torrent of praise, it's that Dead Swans mean every note of the album, and considering that the last band I reviewed, I declared had no souls, this is an improvement. Yes, they just play very fast punk with a guy shouting over it, but how they do it is the sign of how superb they are. It helps that these guys have very personal lyrics, which lend the a huge amount of emotion to the performances - plus it's a great change from the usual hardcore thing of singing incessantly about HEART and PASSION and about how YOU'LL NEVER BRING US DOWN like they're hosting a fucking pep rally. Many years ago Ian MacKaye denounced the term "emotional hardcore" by pointing out that hardcore was always emotional. This was what he meant all along. Vocalist Nick Worthington possesses a superb hardcore shout packed with conviction and purpose, and the obligatory gang-vocal parts are natural and exhilarating, which is good because this album does what all the great hardcore albums do – it doesn’t prepare you for the live performance. This feels like a live performance. The captivating, energising power of this album carries the force of a real band, like the Brighton crew are actually trapped inside your speakers and that’s why they’re screaming. The guitars gracefully shift from sludgy ambient sections to fast, exhilarating riffs, and the dual guitar lines use dark, powerful harmonies to create a perfect atmosphere from start to finish. They also manage to avoid that weird obsession with oceanic and nautical imagery that most young UK bands are so into, which is nice.

"Sleepwalkers" is one of those albums that every genre has that doesn't do anything new, but does everything so well that it still seems like a novelty. It's certainly the best hardcore album any UK band has ever produced, but considering the UK hardcore scene is about three years old, that's not saying much, so let me make a bigger statement. Best hardcore release of the year. Oh, go on. Best hardcore release since This Is Hell's last one.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

P.S. I can also confirm, as of 18/12/09, that this band FUCKING RULES live. All the heart-wrenching emotion of the album is replaced with astonishing fury, and the impact of the crowd favourites whipped the crowd into a mad frenzy. A great show.

Abigail Williams - In The Shadow Of A Thousand Suns

Looking back on my lack of regular output, my constant references to myself and other things you may or may not have heard me say, and the fact that the totality of my journalistic experience is a pokey little blog read by five people and taking up a perfectly good URL, I think it's safe to say that I'm not exactly professional. However, one must aim for higher standards, and I'd like to think that, at least, I'm more professional than to just give the following review:

Abigail Williams - In the Shadow of a Thousand Suns

KEYBOARDS! KEYBOARDS! MOTHERFUCKING KEYBOAAAAAAAAARRRRRDDDDDSSSSSS!

6/10

and call in an evening.

Abigail Williams started out as an interesting prospect - it was essentially a bunch of teen metalheads playing what they knew best; At-The-Gates-style melodeath, epic melodic black metal and the obligatory metalcore vibes. Indeed they did this pretty much to the point of farce; vocalist Ken Sorceron's vocals at the time of their "Legend" EP in particular sounded like they were recorded for a computer-generated imp in a children's fantasy film. However, they were actually rather good. They managed to, for a while, be all things to all men and sounded pretty damn original while doing so. However, personal strife broke the band up, and it looked like a very promising collective had been lost to the aether of intra-band wangst.

Perhaps predictably their breakup was more of a hiatus, but it did start the precedent for them shedding members like a snake sheds skin. They reformed with a new lineup, ditched them and went for another lineup for this album, and you can tell that almost every instrumentalist in the band who wrote "Legends" was gone, because it appears that when hiring new guys, rather than articulate what precisely it was that Abigail Williams did, Sorceron just said, "We play black metal", because that's what they do now. Abigail Williams have essentially become what Emperor would have been had they formed in a mall in Phoenix rather than in a village in Norway.

One returning member from the band's earliest incarnation was keyboardist, eye candy and lead singer's "just friend", Ashley Ellyllon - now of Cradle of Filth, who's membercidal tendancies appear to have inspired Abigail Williams even more than their music - and apparently Sorceron was still trying to work his way into her lacy goth thong, because I can't think of any reason other than that why her keyboards are so high up in the mix that they block out everything except the drums. This is a shame because the guitars are really good, more than capable of shredding out the creepy melodies of the songs with icy malevolence. I know this because I heard a pre-mixing version of the song VII Empyrean: Into the Cold Wastes, in which you could actually hear them. In the final release they are swamped by blobs of generic choir synths to the point in which you can't hear a thing of them. It would seem that the endless insertion of "symphonic" into "symphonic black metal" has overpowered the "black metal" part, because Abigail Williams the Second seem intent on trying to out Dimmu Borgir Dimmu Borgir in their overblown pomp-metal. However, they seem to have missed the point somewhat.

Don't get me wrong, this album is both epic and symphonic, but they miss the point like champs. This album has none of the bite that black metal should have. It's simply very safe. There's no real aggression here, which is actually quite a feat from a band with the full black metal regalia of blast beats, high screams and shreddy guitars. It's just very unchallenging, marketable black metal played with no anguish or rage, and with no real motive but to sound cool. And maybe I've been listening to too much Xasthur and Weakling, but to me, this is the sound of black metal played by kids from southwest America who don't have souls. I'm serious, anyone who can listen to bands like Burzum and Immortal and still make music this emotionless is probably dead inside, or possibly are just pricks.

The real shame is that this once original band is now simply trying to emulate the greats of the genre. Dimmu Borgir, Bal Sagoth and Chthonic are practically namechecked, but the most obvious source of inspiration is Emperor, to the point where it's almost funny. They actually got the Norwegian lot's drummer to play for them as a session skinsman on the album. There's influence and then there's this, my friends. The problem is that they're simply not as good as their idols, no matter how hard they try. Overall this album can be summed up with the phrase "They tried too hard to be something that other people are doing much better", which is a shame because the previous iteration of Abigail Williams did the exact opposite - whether what they were doing was as good as it could be or not was irrelevant, because they were so original that judgement didn't really matter. As it stands, they are a good band, but they're trying to compete with legendary bands. They're up against competition so stiff, and so much more capable of playing this style, that their being "reminiscent of" this competition makes them obsolete, and of no further significance. I'm all for pretending that they died in the initial breakup in 2007, and never returned, while they were still more than the footnote they will now be.