SEGRESSION: Segression

Released: 2002

Segression was a band that I unashamedly championed for quite a few years, from the time I saw them (when they were still known as Eezee) playing to a couple of dozen people in a Liverpool pizza bar. They managed to piss off as many people as they pleased, but at the time of this album, they were one of only a handful of Australian metal bands to have made it to their fourth album and it only took them six years to do it.

After a failed relationship with a label, a few months in the US and replacing yet another drummer, Segression offered this self-titled release as their fourth issue, this time on their own label. There had been some talk among the band about bringing the heaviness back for this album, which was seen by some as an admission that maybe they’d left it behind somewhere along the way and ‘Dragon Mouth Splitter’ starts Segression off on the right foot with a feel and execution that hearkened back to their thrashier early days. After this however the band moves into the nu-metal territory they’d been in since the Fifth of the Fifth album, a style they helped pioneered in this country.

Chris Rand tries out a few different vocal guises across the CD, from a whispery spoken-word approach to his raspy half-shouts and occasional scream and new boy Keith Owen does some nifty work behind the kit. There's also no denying that Segression had lost not a jot of their aggression and rage over the years, as 'Conspire' and 'Segregated Aggresion' – probably the best song on the album – in particular prove. But most of the tracks suffer from a real dearth of variation in the riff department, with the guitars churning out the same chugga-chugga motif over and over again. On past albums Segression had shown that they could put together a riff vicious enough to strip flesh from the bone, so it was hard to figure out exactly what they were thinking here. The unaccountably muddy guitar mix doesn't help matters either. The acoustic ballad is something that they should have perhaps left alone too: they set out to prove they could show other emotions besides anger, but Rand doesn’t quite have the voice to carry it off.

Ultimately Segression was a disappointing note for the band to go out on, and had they continued may have been a hard one to recover from.

1. Dragon Mouth Splitter
2. Lips of Sorrow
3. No One
4. Poison Pen
5. Segregated Aggression
6. What I Would Give
7. Conspire
8. Spoonbled
9. Body
10. You Want Me to Die

Rating: 40%