Evolving Backwards
Sometimes a band can evolve by taking influences of what came before and more strongly embracing those influences. A band can even just use an “old” sound and modernize it ever so slightly. But sometimes, a band looks back to an era of music they really shouldn’t and progression becomes more like regression. In this episode, all the bands reach back into different area’s of Metal’s past…for better or worse…
Reviews:
Whitechapel – Mark of the Blade (Metal Blade)
Spellcaster – Night Hides the World (Prosthetic)
Earth Ship – Hollowed (Napalm)
Whitechapel – Mark Of The Blade
Earth Ship – Hollowed
Spellcaster – Night Hides The World
The Sideshow Podcast 
I don’t really have anything for this week, so I’ll talk about my impressions of the albums from last week (which I didn’t do last week). First and foremost would be Nails. You Will Never Be One Of Us certainly lives up to the high expectations. I do see what you guys mean about their previous album Abandon All Life being a draining listen by the end, whereas when YWNBOOU gets to the end it makes you want to start listening to it all over again. It really doesn’t get tiring. For me though, I think it’s going to be hard to top that wow factor of being blown away by Abandon All Life. So I’m putting the new album just a hair behind their last album. A more recent comparison of Nails would be with Apology by Weekend Nachos. I’m still listening to Apology. It will be very interesting to see where Nails and Weekend Nachos fall relative to each other in the year end lists, as for me right now the race between the two is very close.
As for Magma by Gojira, I have some of the same mixed feelings you guys have of it. The first time listening to it, I was wowed just as Nick was. But repeated listenings have shown that there are certainly some hits and misses on the album. Some of the songs start to sound “same-y” towards the end. I do however like some of the direction of the less heavy sound that they are going for on Magma – it’s just that they don’t pull it off for the entire length of the album. I would be interested in hearing a few of the songs on Magma live when they play at Terminal 5 in October with TesseracT.