If you like your metal, the brand new album by Avatar, Hail The Apocalypse, could well be up your street. Described as metal music made by metal heads for metal heads, it’s perhaps the best description the album could have, but as a whole the album is somewhat of a challenging listen and can be difficult to get into at times.
Second track What I Don’t Know is perhaps a good example of this. The introduction sounds rather disorganised and out of place, with weak vocals and sparse instrumentation that don’t blend together quite well, but that all changes when the full band kicks in. It’s like life has suddenly been given to the track with a groove-induced guitar line you can’t help but want to move about to but something still feels off about the clean vocals and they don’t fit into the bigger picture for this particular track.
Some of the songs are good, like the heavier and noisy number Murderer, and closer Tower is an epic ending to the album, beginning with mysterious and haunting tones that set the scene for one last onslaught of energy before fading out.
However, there are a lot of tracks on the album that either blend into the background, or sound like a mixture of ideas not quite slotting together, so as a result it almost feels like the album is unfinished and needs a bit more work before it becomes a formidable offering.
6/10
