Produced by Jeff Waters
Released: 2007
This album caused considerable brouhaha when first announced, but with guest appearances by Jeff Loomis from Nevermore, Anders Bjorler from The Haunted, Jesper Stromblad from In Flames, Trivium's Corey Beaulieu, and the Arch Enemy pair of Angela Gossow and Michael Amott, among others, it's easy to see why. So imagine my disappointment when the latest Annihilator album turned out to be one of the cruddiest things I've heard in ages. Seriously, I want Jeff Waters to give me an hour of his life in exchange for the hour he stole from me with this. And while he's there, give me an extra two hours for the last couple of albums as well.
Metal promised a couple of things. First of all, by it's very title it promised metal. Secondly, it promised a bunch of colloborations with a bunch of shit-hot guitarists. It pretty much fails on every level. Dave Padden's vocals are annoyingly bland and try-hard at times, and Loomis' and Alexi Laiho's contributions are the only ones that really stand out. If the other guys' solos weren't notated in the booklet, you would barely notice that it's anyone other than Waters himself.
The album kicks off in fine style with "Clown Parade", a nice crunchy and pacy thrash track featuring some quality trade-offs between Waters and Loomis. It's one and only highpoint on the album. The very next song is a lame radio track featuring someone called Danko Jones, the singer from an Ontario rock band who are nothing spectacular from the samples I sought out after hearing this. For some reason, Angela from Arch Enemy does her demonic vocal stuff in the background here, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out why. After this, Lips from Anvil gets roped in to lay down a 38-second lead break in "Army of One", an embarassingly awful 'shout-out' to the old school that's even worse than some of the stuff Anvil themselves have come up with lately. And that's saying something.
Metal doesn't really get any better after this. Alexi Laiho plays all over "Downright Dominate" but the track itself is just generic filler, and pretty much every other song is cut-and-pasted metal-by-numbers crap, with barely-noticeable guest appearances tossed in to make people buy it. Add to this the fact that seven pages of the booklet are full-page ads for all the companies Waters endorses and what you really have here is one of the biggest sell-outs in metal history. If this is all Jeff Waters has left in him, he needs to do something else with the rest of his life.
- Clown Parade
- Couple Suicide
- Army of One
- Downright Dominate
- Smothered
- Operation Annihilation
- Haunted
- Kicked
- Detonation
- Chasing the High
Rating: 20%
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