Metal Reviews

Apparently Nuclear Blast's album of the year. Fear Factory-ish with solos. Opinions?

Why not give yours first?

I haven't really formed any yet, but first impression: Pretty good, not as bad as most nu-metal... fast playing and pretty good clean vocals.

Don't like them. They're not that much like Fear Factory, more Meshuggah lite I thought, and too similar to a lot of other bands.

there's a lot of one-note riffing, and the drums remind me of slipknot... but otherwise, i actually like it.

Just listened to the song on their myspace that actually works and it was pretty cool. I'd have to hear the whole album since if all the songs did the angry verse/melodic chorus thing I'd want to rip my eyes out by the 3rd one.

actually, some have soft melodic keybboard. and others are just aggression. with no melodic bit.

This album got old FAST for me. I'm a huge Fear Factory fan, and with the first song Rational Eyes sounding quite a bit like Shock to the System in places and the album being produced by Christian Olde Wolbers, it seemed like something worth looking into. With Fear Factory currently sucking ass, they seemed like a solid second choice...but yeah, the rest of the album actually shares more in common with Meshuggah, except Threat Signal are far more generic and derivative. Nowhere near as technical and the riffwork is just completely typical mid-90's US groove metal, with some Gathering-Testament (extremely overrated album in my opinion) sprinkled in. Nothing particularly memorable. The heavy verse/clean chorus formula appears on I think six or seven songs on there, and the choruses are all pretty damn emo, poppy and commercial in nature. Most of the time, the clean vocals sound EXACTLY like Chester Bennington from Linkin Park, and on the song "A New Beginning" the songwriting isn't all that far removed from that band either (minus the hip-hop element).

The production is nice and heavy (far better than the latest Fear Factory) and the lead work is extremely solid and flowing, but that's pretty much it as for good points to speak of.