The Red Shore -Unconsecrated

Tue 2nd Dec, 2008 in Music Reviews

Occasionally there’s a metal album that crosses boundaries, taking the heavier elements of its music and making them appeal to an audience that would generally not enjoy them. Records like Metallica’s The Black Album take marginalized genres to the mainstream, carving the path for slews of new artists to follow in their wake.

The Red Shore’s Unconsecrated is not one of those albums. It feels like derivative, standard issue hardcore death metal. The album quickly blends into a mess of technical drums, deathly howls and the occasional fretboard-tapping Nintendo guitar lick. There’s nothing here that makes any attempt to step in a new direction, with every song just rehashing itself. Exceptions like Slain By the Serpent and Rise & Fall break the formula a little, leading with something other than drums. The resultant shifts in approach and tempo feel like stylistic back flips on an album as steadfastly uniform as this.

The backing vocals, vaguely reminiscent of System of a Down’s Daron Malakian, provide as much of a deviation from the template as The Red Shore offer, but it’s hard to see much new material here. The death of vocalist Damien Morris led to bassist Jamie Hope stepping up to the vocals, and their similarity makes the tracks remarkably seamless. But sadly, this album fails to leave the kind of mark the band was hoping for. It’s not bad, but it’s almost exclusively bland.

Fans of the genre may enjoy this the same way Queen fans liked The Darkness – it’s fun to listen to if you love that stuff or don’t own anything similar, but there are better options within reach. Sadly, Unconsecrated winds up completely forgettable.