An open letter to metal bands everwhere:

Fin.

I know that this is a moot point, but I feel like it must be agonizingly made clear until this trend goes away. In my history of listening to metal I cannot recall a single time that a hardcore breakdown was good. They are not brutal. They are not musically interesting. A breakdown is to relieve tension in the middle of the metal chaos then slowly build it back up until it releases into an orgy of metallic goodness. Tool’s Vicarious does this admirably. Opeth’s Deliverance has a breakdown that seems to last forever, but fits perfectly into the music and the layering of sounds as it continues only makes the song better, perhaps being the highlight of an amazing song.

Most bands don’t get this. What’s even worse is that I think that many bands don’t understand that they are doing it.

Massive Slavery from Canada is such a band. Filled with fine musicians, the music on display here teeters through many different types of metal and occasionally hits the sweet spots but ultimately finds home in bad clichés.

What these bands would call a Meshuggah influence sounds like a hardcore breakdown. What could be mistaken for a Lamb of God rhythm ends up just being a hardcore breakdown.

Stop this madness. You are too good for this.

Anyways, I really hate making such a big deal about this, but time and time again I see perfectly fine bands that diminish the quality of their product by this flaw. Massive Slavery do a lot of things well. They are tight, they know how to build a riff without just calling a bunch of random notes “tech”, and they get how song structure works. The problem is that they fall back on these easy way outs that it becomes irritating and detracts from the music.

The most obvious example would be the band’s theme. With songs called Pull the Plug on Modern Civilization, Destroy, Rebuild, Repeat…, and even the album title itself Global Enslavement it’s easy to figure out the message: The media is bad and we are all just mindless sheep being led by corporate leaders who manipulate Washington and moneymoneymoneymoneytvisbrainwashingyoumoneyisbadmoney. I personally don’t mind politics in my music as others do and put Rage Against the Machine and System of a Down in my rotation regularly, but this is so blatantly obvious that the lyrics read like a Michael Moore film.

Now back to the songs themselves. Wait a minute, did I read that there is a song ACTUALLY called Destroy, Rebuild, Repeat? Guys… come on. I understand referencing an influence or two, but does it have to be this obvious? Plenty of bands love Metallica but I have yet to see any songs called Manipulator of Marionettes… actually never mind. That would be awesome. Disregard this paragraph.

Anyways, like I said before when the band clicks, they click. The riffage occasionally gets more than my toes tapping and when the band completely tunes in and embraces their melodic death metal influence it easily tops anything that Dark Tranquility have done since Damage Done. Hell, a lot of it sounds better than anything that In Flames has done in a decade.

My favorite song on the album would have to be The Denial of Man’s Regression which kicks a lot of serious ass until…. No… not a breakdown… the “clean part” of the song. You know, where the band slows it all down so that the lead guitarist can do an emotional solo. Like Between the Buried and Me, only different? That doesn’t make sense. Whatever.

If you dig Lamb of God or any of their contemporaries then there is a good chance that you might find something in Global Enslavement. For me, it’s good for a car ride to work and I’d rather keep it for the two times a year that I’ll give it a spin rather than give it to a friend or use as a Frisbee. That really just depends on how much you like Frisbees though. If you really like Frisbees then this is going to probably be a hard decision to make, but that’s ok. Frisbees are a lot of fun to play with. You might even want to take your dog to the park for a good game of Frisbee. Watch out though, a compact disc is not very strong and could very well crack and shatter in your dogs mouth, which could send shards of plastic into it’s brains which in retrospect would make for awesome subject material for your death metal band…

I have come to a point in this review where I have no idea where to go. At this point I will take the popular choice of ending something that has become tiring and stagnant:

A hardcore breakdown.

Duh duh duh… duhduh duh tweedily duh duh duh. Bum Bum duh dunuhnuh.