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The Agony SceneThe Darkest Red Roadrunner/UMG Against all odds, The Agony Scene have managed to produce an album that works almost in spite of itself. Let's get this straight: no musical boundaries are pushed on 'The Darkest Red': the song structures, including the vocal patterns, are standard, there's not a single guitar solo and the lyrics are competent without being inspired. It's exactly what you'd expect. By rights, I should hate this album. But I don't. 'The Darkest Red' could be run-of-the-mill metalcore, albeit slightly more interesting than the mediocre hardcore riffs that most metalcore bands seem to fall back on at least once in every song. Yet they perform it with such energy that it requires more effort to dislike it than just to accept that it's not such a bad album after all. There are even a few tracks that border on a more death metal sound, if only for a riff or two. Scapegoat and Suffer bring a slightly American death sound to the album; the latter even has a brief blast beat, and some nice diminished riffs. My Dark Desire, on the other hand, is almost impossibly catchy without losing its heaviness. And not a bad sort of catchy either (I never said the song titles were great, however). The production is much what would be expected, the hands of Rob Caggiano (ex-Anthrax) behind the desk has producing a very crisp sound, although the reason behind using distortion on Michael Williams' already grim vocals remains a mystery. The Agony Scene has managed to produce a metalcore album that actually retains the listener's interest for its entire duration. While it's not the album of the year, it's at least a decent way to spend forty minutes.  |
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