Life of Agony: River Runs Red (1993)

Back in the mid 1990's, I picked up the album Ugly, Life of Agony's second release after reading a somewhat favorable review in some music magazine whose name escapes me at the moment.  The album became something of a soundtrack for my teen angst years, particularly with songs like "Unstable" (which spoke to me as I was dating a girl with some extreme health issues at the time) and "Damned if I Do".  Gradually as I grew up, the album was shoved aside and I did not listen to it for many years.  Life of Agony's music on that release seemed more in line with heavy alternative rock than metal.  Recently I pulled the album back out and listened to it and was surprised at the fact that I can clearly identify some very real sludge metal-type riffs.  The album actually sounds like a (much) lighter version of Crowbar than I remembered.

Unfortunately, the band's third album Soul Searching Sun never did much of anything for me.  I picked it up due to my feelings about the previous album and because I actually did like the song "Weeds", which was the album's first single.  Every other song was pretty much awful though.  The band went too far down the alternative rock road.  Even "Weeds" fit in much better with the alternative rock and grunge sound of the era than with anything metal.  I have not pulled this one back out. 

I kind of forgot about Life of Agony for many years and never really checked in with the band in subsequent years.  The band did not release another album until 2005.  I was surprised to learn that vocalist Keith Caputo came out as transexual in 2011 and began transitioning to female.  She now goes by the name Mina.  That was the first I heard from Life of Agony in a long time.  And then they sort of exited my consciousness again. 

Until just recently.  Somehow I heard something about how great the band's first album was.  I was never able to find it when I got into the band as it was out of print and these were the days before it was really easy to buy music on the internet.  I decided to give it a shot and I was shocked by what I heard.  This album is definitely a metal album.  At this time, Life of Agony's sound was a concoction of thrash metal, crossover and sludge metal.  There are times when the band really does sound like Crowbar.  There are others when the band's Brooklyn roots are laid bare and they sound like a combination of Carnivore, early Type O Negative and Biohazard.  For instance, any time the band uses gang vocals, the Carnivore/Type O Negative influence is clear.  "Method of Groove", with its half-rapped vocals, sounds like Biohazard.  In fact, I'm still shocked that Evan Seinfeld did not make a guest appearance on the track.

The teen angst is definitely still the primary lyrical theme on this album.  It appears to be something of a concept album, covering a particularly bad week in the life of a teenager.  The album is interspersed with tracks that feature the sound of the main character's horrible home life and often features him listening to progressively more depressing phone messages.  Prior to the events of the album, his friend died.  Then the first story track features his girlfriend leaves him.  Then he is fired from his job and told that he will not graduate as he is failing two courses.  Finally, his mother and father get into a massive fight and his mother is in the process of leaving when the main character apparently commits suicide.  It is pretty brutal.

From this point on, this will be the album I think of when I think of Life of Agony.  And this one, despite definitely being a product of its time, should be considered a landmark album in its rather small niche genre.