Trivium - The Crusade

Thu 2nd Nov, 2006 in Music Reviews

My, do Trivium get a bad rap in the modern community.

It’s as if the world is unsure whether to embrace them or recoil in disgust from the simple fact that the band heist a number of heavy giants from times past and have found success and acclaim in doing so: they’re at the forefront of the “metal-core” following, and they’re barely out of their teens. All the accusations, however, run true: they sound more like early Metallica than ever on their third album, The Crusade (right down to the Hetfield idiosyncrasies), plus there are nods to Iron Maiden and Machine Head. Should any band ever become big by jumping on the backs of nostalgia and somebody else’s genre-changing influence?

The answer is no, and the word for The Crusade unless you’re a fan is also no, because try as it might, it never settles into a world as epic or as hard-hitting as the one it’s set up for itself.  The album is loosely based on a concept surrounding society’s corruption (take a look at To The Rats), which is fine; but they neither have the anger, the desperation, or the voice in Matt Heafy to pull it off.  If they were some emerging band it might make do, but they’re trying to basically rip off the Bay Area thrash scene, using lyrical topics that don’t take themselves too lightly, and Trivium’s music is too weak or too watery to be taken to heart. A half-hearted solo pops its head out of the sludge every now and then, sometimes to give their tracks a progressive edge, sometimes for no other reason than because they know people will be listening.  There are a few good songs along the way: only rarely does a guitar match the rhythm section with such precision as it does in the ominous down-tuned And Sadness Will Sear, and This World Can’t Tear Us Apart is the inevitable love song that takes enough of a detour (it’s actually quite melodic, and stops their stabbing obsession with speed music) to make it sound like something quite fresh. Detonation is an above-average single in the band’s back catalog, and Anthem (We Are the Fire) is a fairly angsty fist-pumping future choice for that position:

“Woah! Woah! Woah! Woah! Woah! Woah! Woah! Woah!
Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah!”

As you can probably see, it’s not exactly the most intelligent of the current heavy metal breed, but it’s fun nonetheless. The rest, some nine tracks, shows an over-ambitious band coming up short.  A step up from their wilder 2003 album Asccendancy, The Crusade is nonetheless disappointing in weight alone. This is meant to be their Master Of Puppets, and right down to the instrumental thrown in at the end (The Crusade), Trivium know it. The good news is, while they’re presently unoriginal and mostly dull, they’re still young, leaving high hopes about where they might go from here on in.  After all, it’s hard to get any lower than imitating mid-80s Metallica, is it?