Rating:*/5
Listening to Trivium, is like reading The First Circle by Alexander Soltzhenitsyn. If you are familiar with this text, then you'll understand why i say this, whether you agree or not is another matter.
Subjecting anyone to listen to Trivium is unspeakable, well that's my opinion anyway. They are a well respected Metal band from Orlando,Florida. They rose to prominence with their Crusade album of a few years ago, being named as a serious successor to the throne of Metal's next best thing since Metallica, understandable in Metal circles given the fact that many facets of their sound are influenced by them. Ultimately this is a tried attempt by anyone to try and live up to the aformentioned powerhouse, and it is sickly in vain as so many tried attempts have failed resulting in many metal bands folding into a sub standard stereotypical sludge infested farce which they will inevitably become.
So again subjecting anyone to Trivium's lastest effort should be said in advance to be a waste of time on anyone's behalf. Well i'm not in the business of judging something before i've listened to it, so the only way we are going to get through is one.
Comparing listening to Trivium, to living in a Gulag Prison is a bit of a stretch you would say. For someone who doesn't like generic hardcore metal bands then it is. But I haven't written them off yet. I was excited to hear about this release because i wanted them to prove me wrong.
Trivium toured and did the big day out 2007, to much acclaim. They also did private shows which big crowds attended. I attended their set at the Perth leg of the festival, and was a little disappointed after all the hype i'd heard surrounding this band. They sounded clogged up with everything that was going with the sound. The arrangements as I expected were busy as, with guitars going a hundred miles an hour, and there was a lot of intesity in the performance and atmosphere. Having said that, if you had someone record the live set from a soundboard you would notice how terrible the band sounded if you heard the audio and had not been there.
So why do i reference the First Circle book? Well, the story entails a bunch of prisoners are captured, and are used to assist in Stalin's regime involving security. The characters are faced with the moral dilemma of contributing to the decay of the Soviet Union and it's people.
It's similar in a way, because by listening to this music you may be contributing to the decline of metal music. I'm doing the same by reviewing it. It wouldn't like to see this band like many others contribute another mediocre entry into the worldof music.It's happened all too many times now, i just hope the genre doesn't implode, and we're left with no outlet for venom in contemporary music.
It does implode upon commencement, and that's probably the best thing about the album, on about the 4th listen by now it's integral appeal will be the emphasis on heavy riffing, and the tight compositional structure of the tracks. This wasn't evident when i saw them live at all, because the sound was too cluttered and busy, and the live interpretations didn't do any favours for the studio takes. Burdened with the fact that they sound a hell of a lot like Metallica, i feel that they've tried to break out of this mould but were unable to, infusing their sound with more modern flourishes doesn't take away how dated the twin guitars sound upon listening to tracks like "Torn Between Scylla And Charybdis", and indeed the bulk of the songs on Shogun.
A different aspect of their songwriting involves more mythical subject matters, so that is something they have incorporated into their sound.
Shogun will please fans, but it's nothing I haven't heard before. Their overbuilt hype has been in vain in many respects, this won't be the decline of civilization but i will force you to question who your next metal heroes will be. Substandard. Sub zero. One star for the cover art. Prisoners of war were lucky Trivium weren't around the time of Stalin's regime.
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