One of metal's great tragedies is how Century Media completely castrated the majority of their extreme metal roster in the mid-'90s. The bands certainly aren't blameless either, but I never thought this was mere coincidence. I truly believe the label was nefariously pushing hard for bands to go towards more marketable, modern, and atmospheric pastures. We'll get back to that in a moment.
As for the disc itself, I was very happy to find this for $3, as it filled a longtime gap in my Swedish DM collection, and despite it having some old store stickers on the case, it was in excellent condition.
My (non-)history with this album is a bit unusual. When the album was new, I heard the lumbering anthem "Hail the New Age" on the Identity compilation and immediately loved it. I like the song more than any individual track on the 2nd and 3rd Unleashed albums. Unfortunately, the only time I came across it back in the day was a copy for full used price which was missing its back insert. I obviously passed. As time went on it seemed like the album wasn't terribly well-regarded, so it never became a big priority to me.
The glaring problem with Victory is the opener "Victims of War," an absolutely terrible choice because of the start/stop groove metal-esque riffage. It immediately soured me on rest of the album, thinking they were going down the route Grave did on Hating Life, but thankfully, it turned out to be a one off.
Despite "Hail the New Age," I don't like this as much overall as the first 3 albums. It's still a solid listen and there's not a particularly big step down in quality or anything, it just comes off as simpler and lacks some of the extra touches that contributed to the atmosphere of the earlier stuff. There seems to be a greater focus on faster tracks here ("Legal Rapes," "In the Name of God," "Revenge") than on Across the Open Sea (the only one I can remember off the top of my head is "Forever Goodbye"), and these are all fine. If you overlook the first track, this seems to be an album that largely escaped the Century Media curse, especially compared to the aforementioned Grave album or Asphyx's God Cries.
No comments:
Post a Comment