Worst/Most Disappointing Albums of 2012

5.  BONDED BY BLOOD: THE AFTERMATH
Bonded by Blood was once one of the more impressive retro thrash metal bands out there.  Their last release was very good.  Unfortunately, they went through a change in vocalists and basically phoned in this album.  A shame.

4.  ELUVEITIE: HELVETIOS
When I first heard Eluveitie, I was blown away by them.  Their combination of melodic death metal an Celtic folk metal was extremely impressive.  But since then, Eluveitie has been trying desperately to remake that same album to increasingly lackluster results.  I am not sure I will give them another chance.

3.  SONATA ARCTICA: STONES GROW HER NAME
Like Eluveitie, Sonata Arctica was a band that I was so impressed by when I first heard them that I still check them out on new albums despite not being horribly impressed by anything they have put out since I first heard them.  This is their worst one yet.  It's basically modern rock at this point, there is very little power metal left.

2.  TIAMAT: THE SCARRED PEOPLE
I do not care for Tiamat's take on gothic rock.  But with seemingly each new release I hear something about the band incorporating some of their atmospheric death metal elements that the band did so well early on.  Each time it is false.  This time is no exception.

1.  THE SORROW: MISERY-ESCAPE
Run-of-the-mill metalcore with Christian lyrics.  Need I say more?

FMA Reviews: Tiamat: The Scarred People

Originally reviewed here.

It was with great trepidation that I started listening to this album. My experiences with Tiamat have been inconsistent to put it lightly. I absolutely loved The Astral Sleep. It was a terrific album of atmospheric death metal and sounded quite unlike anything else I had heard to that point. I became aware that the band altered their sound drastically but checked out A Deeper Kind of Slumber anyway. That one bored me into a coma. So this is only the third full-length album that I have listened to by Tiamat. I guess we will see where this comes in.

Well this is gothic rock. There is the occasional metal influence but for the most part there is little to no aggression present in these songs. At the same time it is not as ethereal and dream-like as Slumber. The songs are slower paced with a lot of melody. There are guitar leads weaving around the mostly keyboard-driven melancholic music. The vocals are typically delivered in a dry, soothing baritone sounding similar to the vocals of Moonspell's Fernando Ribeiro.

If you are looking for atmospheric death metal, do not look here. This sounds like a completely different band than the one that recorded Astral Sleep. There are some metal influences present such as the driving force of the opening track and "Love Terrorists", but even those moments are fleeting. For the most part this is fairly straightforward gothic rock. The songs do grow old after awhile and I had a hard time retaining interest in it.

This is a perfectly acceptable release if you like this sort of thing. I however do not. There is a little bit more musically going on than on Slumber but I still will likely not listen to this very often, if at all.

Blind Buy Surprise Albums: (Dis)Honorable Mentions

I recently did a series of albums that I picked up blindly that were huge successes. Those albums became some of my favorites and I had no idea what I was getting myself into by getting them. Well, sometimes things don't work out that way. Every once in awhile, I will buy an album with some level of expectation that then goes horribly, horribly awry. This post will look at two of those collossal mistakes.

When I used to listen to a lot of styles of hard rock (for the last several years I have been limited to metal) I would occasionally buy an album that was for the most part pretty wretched. Particularly in the nu-metal subgenre. Since I have been exclusively into metal for a few years, there have not been too many blind buy mistakes. There has been one, one in which I thought I knew what to expect but was very wrong. Early on, there was one other one which I will address as it is related to the metal genre. Prior to that though, there were several others, bands I just don't listen to anymore so I won't cover them.

These are the metal blind buys that did not work out:

TIAMAT: A DEEPER KIND OF SLUMBERI did discuss this album early on in the formation of this blog. I owned an album by Tiamat that I got in a Century Media Grab Bag and I was spellbound by the dark atmospheric death metal of that album. I was vaguely aware that Tiamat did not really sound like that for much longer, but went in a gothic direction. However, I did not know how far they had fallen.

One day, I was in Hastings Bookstore in Kearney, Nebraska after a final divorce hearing. I was there to pick up new releases from Arch Enemy, Down, High on Fire, and Amorphis, and I also saw this reissue of the Tiamat album. Having enough cash to pick up five albums, I decided to grab it.

It wasn't until late that night that I started to listen to it. I was not pleased with what I heard. There was not an ounce of metal on the entire album. The whole thing was some ethereal dreamlike sonicscape. Gone were the dark atmospherics of the other Tiamat I knew and the harsh vocals and the crushing, malevolent riffs. In their place were just long, meandering melodies and soft vocals. I couldn't listen to a single song without falling asleep. I should say, the first song isn't terrible, but it's not any different from the bland bullshit put out by H.I.M.

The next time I was in Kearney (which was that weekend to visit my brother), I took the CD back and exchanged it for Immolation's Failures for Gods. Recently, I downloaded it to listen to it fully and see if it was as bad as I remembered. It is.

TRIBES OF NEUROT & WALKING TIME BOMBS: STATIC MIGRATIONI don't remember what the hell my thought process was in picking this thing up. I remember being in high school and going to Best Buy with a friend. We were browsing CDs just to kill some time. I remember picking up a couple of CDs, trying to find something new. I do remember having a Kyuss CD in my hand at one point. But then I saw this and realized it was on the same label as Amorphis, a band I had only recently become interested in. It also stated that it was a side project of Neurosis, a band I had heard of and knew were part of the metal/hard rock scene. So, I picked it up and bought it. Huge mistake.

It wasn't until the ride back from dropping the friend off that I listened to it, and there was NOTHING THERE. There was no music. It was just noise. Ambient albums do not interest me in the slightest. I just don't understand them. This album is no exception. It's apparently meant to be played at the same time as one of Neurosis's albums, but I can't imagine how and I don't care, quite frankly. To make matters even more confusing, Walking Time Bombs is apparently Scott Hull of Pig Destroyer and Agoraphobic Nosebleed. How did Neurosis and a member of Pig Destroyer get together to form something so awful?! This album is single-handedly the reason I have not checked out Neurosis or anything by Scott Hull. Plus, it's fucking 75 minutes long!

True testament to how bad this album is: when I was in college, my car was broken into and a lot of my CDs, my stereo, my backpack with my expensive new calculator, my tape player, and a lot of other stuff were stolen. I was out over $1,000.00 worth of stuff. A few weeks later, my backpack was found outside a college dorm and I was contacted to pick it up. All my school papers and books were there, so was my tape player thankfully, as well as some random stuff, including this CD. That's right, not even the assholes who broke into my car to steal a bunch of CDs wanted this one. Not even to sell.

The worst part about this post was actually listening to these albums once more, just to "inspire" me to write about them.

Great Band, Terrible Album Pt. 1: Tiamat: A Deeper Kind of Slumber

Tiamat was actually never a great band, although early in their career, they put out a couple of great albums. The Astral Sleep is a masterful atmospheric death metal album, very emotional and powerful. Soon thereafter though, Tiamat began incorporating gothic rock influences into their sound. Soon these influences began to become the sound. By the time A Deeper Kind of Slumber was released, all the death metal elements had been drained. This album marked the end of the atmospheric death metal sound of the previous albums. The harsh vocals were gone, the powerful riffs, even the pounding drums had all been replaced. Slumber indeed. I have attempted to listen to this album on several occasions and each time, I end up falling asleep. There are almost no dynamics, no energy at all. Unfortunately, Tiamat has never totally recovered as this is basically their current sound. They have attempted to re-add some metal influences, but the deep atmospheric death metal of The Astral Sleep is gone forever.