Don't ask why I didn't get to this one earlier. Considering the fact that it's by one of the most well known names in metal music, you'd have expected this to have been higher on my list of albums to check out.
And, honestly, it was. But the controversial nature of this album put me off checking it out, which was not helped by the title track being...erm, not what I expected from Megadeth, to put it politely. However, I'm a sucker for a good bargain and, when I found this was being sold for £4 in a store, I figured that it was worth snapping it up. Plus, I'd been debating having a go at reviewing this for a while now anyway, so that just happened to be a case of good timing.
Anyway, everyone probably knows who Megadeth are, so I'm going to skip the talk about their past. What I will say (for the benefit of those not keeping up to date with what Megadeth's been up to) is that, after Th1rt3en, Megadeth (or, at least, founding member, vocalist, guitarist and main songwriter Dave Mustaine) have been in the metal press for reasons not relating to music and, well, not for good reasons either. Now, this isn't anything new if you're familiar with what Dave's been like since the band returned from their break up, but it would fair to say that the band could be fairly accused of having a poor reputation in light of Dave's actions. They left Roadrunner Records in early 2013 to form their own label, Tradecraft, which had the album distributed through Universal Records, so, naturally, expectations were high that the band could produce a solid thrash album to start off their (relative) independence.
...Well, we all know how THAT went.
This album has received a lot of reviews that generally fall between "mixed" and "bad", with some fans going so far as to claim that Risk is a better album than this is, although a general consensus is that it's one of Megadeth's weakest offerings. But does that necessarily make it a bad album in its own right? After all, some bands have such a high reputation for quality that their weakest offerings would be another band's strongest offerings, so surely that means that Megadeth has done that, right?
Well...no. While it's not as bad as some people will claim it is, it's still not a particularly good album, as even the best songs on here would probably be considered weaker offerings on a better album. Or is a cover, in the case of "Cold Sweat".
Let's start with the good stuff on the album (because there is some). "Kingmaker", despite the melody line to the verses bearing a surprising similarity to Black Sabbath's "Children Of The Grave", is a pretty enjoyable song overall and gets the album off to a decent start. While it's not an opening track that is going to go down as one of Megadeth's best album openers (it doesn't outdo "Holy Wars...The Punishment Due" and "Wake Up Dead", just to name two of my favourites!), it's still a good enough opener to justify keeping it on the band's setlist for now (indeed, according to setlist.fm, it's the only song from the album to consistently appear on the band's touring setlist at the minute, with "Cold Sweat" having not been played since December 2013 and the title track having not been played since July 2013...). It's also among the most thrash influenced song on the album, which means that thrashers will at least enjoy this one more than, say, "Super Collider" (which I'll come to later...).
The next song that I'd say really stands out is "Dance In The Rain", although it doesn't start out like that! At first, it's just Megadeth with Dave doing his typical talking over the music (word of advice: if you can't convey something through your song's lyrics and have to speak it, that's your cue to start again with the lyrics!) and, for a lot of the runtime, it just plods...but then it picks up at about the 3 and a half minute mark into one of the best songs Megadeth have released since The System Has Failed. It's made up of a brilliant riff that throws back to Megadeth's thrash roots wonderfully, has one of the best vocal performances on a Megadeth album since the band reunited (although it says a lot that it's NOT by Dave Mustaine, but by Dave Draiman...oh yeah, he's on this album! And does a wonderful job with his only appearance on it, if you ask me, and I'm saying that as a guy who isn't a fan of Disturbed!) and actually sounds like one of the most inspired moments on the whole album! It's a shame that this had to be attached to the rest of the song, as it could have become a highlight on the album if it had been made into its own song, easily!
"Don't Turn Your Back..." is pretty solid as well. Nothing especially great by Megadeth standards, but it's certainly an enjoyable track.
Lastly, we get to the Thin Lizzy cover, "Cold Sweat". I'll admit, I'm not familiar with the original version of this song, so I can't say how good it sounds compared to the original, but I found this a very enjoyable song. It's just a shame that this had to be one of the highlights of the album, as it says a lot about the quality of the rest of the album!
A few songs have a few interesting moments that I want to single out before I tear into the rest of the album. I like the slide guitar and fiddle part on "The Blackest Crow", although it doesn't really ascend the song from being dull. I also have to say that the main riff to "Forget To Remember", while making me think of "Trust" and "Almost Honest" more than it probably should be doing, is pretty solid. The song itself...it's certainly better than a lot of the rest of the album, but I don't think it's strong enough to single it out as a highlight, to be honest. Eh, what the heck, I'll give it the benefit of the doubt this time!
So, that's four songs that are worth a listen (and a fifth that isn't a highlight, but is strong enough for me to feel guilty about not mentioning it). What about the rest? Well, let's put it this way: some of the songs here COULD have been much better if a stronger vocalist was singing them. Let's look at "Kingmaker" for a second: it's a good song, but could you imagine how much better it might have sounded if, say, Chuck Billy of Testament was singing it instead of Dave? That issue crops up on "Built For War": if Chuck Billy had sung it, I reckon it could have been a great song (seriously, imagine Chuck doing his lower, growly tone for the chorus!), but, with Dave singing it, the vocals let it down and drag it down to just being OK. Some, however, couldn't have been salvaged, even if you ignore the fact that the Megadeth name comes with the expectation of thrash metal and look at them on their own merit. Take the title track: it just feels tired from the moment it starts and even a vocal performance by a great vocalist (which Dave never was, at least from a technical perspective) wouldn't be enough to save this song from just being dull.
The lyrics also have gone downhill. Don't believe me? Go look up the lyrics to "Beginning Of Sorrow". The song sounds like it's about how abandoning children makes them grow up to be monsters, but the way it starts out leaves you with a lot of questions that REALLY should have been sorted out before they were sung. I may be reading too much into it, but there are too many potential interpretations that should not be needing me to try to guess what the right one is if you're not trying to attempt some cryptic writings (and I know that was a terrible attempt at humour, but I couldn't resist!)! Is it a song about whether you should abort unwanted children? Is it a song about whether a child should be adopted? Is it about how children grow up to be like their parents? A bit of clarification would have been nice, guys!
And, really, that leaves me with a big question about this album: who is it meant to appeal to? It won't win over the thrash fans, as they tend to react to anything which isn't thrash with...less than enthusiastic reactions, to put it politely. Yet it won't gain the band any new fans in this day and age, as metal and rock in general are almost completely ignored on the radio, so it likely won't be heard by those who might want to hear it. Plus, if you have heard of Megadeth before now, you'll know them for their reputation as part of the Big 4 of thrash metal. Maybe there are fans out there who loved the band's 90's output and were craving a return to that (heck, one of my first Megadeth albums was Cryptic Writings, so I can get why some would want that...), but is it really worth appealing to that crowd when you consider Megadeth's reputation? And, if you do go for that crowd, why release an album that just sounds like you aren't putting your all into it? All of those factors add together to just make this album feel like it wasn't written with an audience in mind. And, while I do get that artists have the liberty to do what they want and I would never say that an artist must only write an album to suit their audience (people change as they get older and what you loved doing as a young adult might not be something you want to do when you're 50...[PURGED BY ORDER OF THE ORDOS HERETICUS AND MALLEUS]), there is a point when you have to stop and ask whether what you've written is what people want to listen to. To put it another way, you are within your right as an artist to play something with more time changes than a travel journalist's watch, a guitar solo with more notes than your average law book and running for longer than a marathon, but, if nobody wants to listen to, what's the point?
And that's the thing that, I think, Dave's messed up on the most this time. With thrash having returned, there's just no real need for the band to return to doing Megadeth's type of material from the 90's. Metallica have made a return to metal (if, admittedly, not quite to thrash metal, although "My Apocalypse" was about the closest they've come for a good while!), Anthrax made a welcome return to some attempt at thrash with Worship Music (and are apparently working on one of their thrashiest albums for a while now...fingers cross that isn't just journalistic bullcrap!) and Slayer...well, Slayer technically didn't completely give up on metal in the first place, but World Painted Blood was very much a thrash record. Again, I get that Dave might have wanted to do a less thrash influenced record because he wants to do something different (before fans start treating this as an insult, actually stop and ask whether you'd want to be performing the same songs again and again for years, potentially night after night without any real break and potentially songs that you don't like much, but everyone else really likes...yeah, see what I mean?), but it still doesn't sound like he was putting his all into this record, instead aiming for that bit of mainstream success that pushed his streamlining of Megadeth's sound in the 90's and lead to albums such as Cryptic Writings and Risk (although, granted, those two were partially due to Bud Prager's influence, so you can fairly say that those two are not quite the best examples...). And I just don't think it was necessary.
If Dave wanted to do this for other reasons, I can respect that and I will happily take back the last two paragraphs. But that's just what it sounds like to my ears.
Anyway, since I've been harping on about what the album isn't as opposed to what it is, let me return back to my attempt at being a serious critic. The production on this album is pretty good, I have to say! It's maybe on the louder side of things and the bass could do with a tiny bit more prominence in the mix, but I otherwise have no major complaints about it! And, for all my complaints about the material, it's still very well performed. I do think that the drumming is still a step down from the classic line up (no disrespect intended towards Glenn Drover: I'm aware thrash drumming isn't as easy as a lot of people tend to make it out to be when complaining about it), but everyone certainly puts effort into the instrumental sections of the music. While I think Dave might want to consider retiring as Megadeth's vocalist due to how far downhill his voice has gone since the 80's (he sounds bored a lot of the time on the album), the fact that he's been singing for the band for about three decades now is still not lost on me and, to be honest, I can't think of anyone who could really replace him as a vocalist (in his prime, he fit the music brilliantly, despite being a pretty poor vocalist on a technical level), so I just don't see that happening.
So, is this album really the worst album Megadeth has released? Unfortunately, I have to agree with the majority and say that, while it's not the outright worst album they have released, it is certainly among the worst. As an album in its own right, however, it's an OK album. Unfortunately, Megadeth have never been about releasing material that is just "OK": they are one of the biggest names in thrash and have at least two albums (Peace Sells...But Who's Buying and Rust In Peace) which are considered classics of thrash metal. At their best, they could make Metallica quake in their boots with their raw aggression and (not counting Dave's vocals) could probably outplay all of the members of the band at their own game (and I'm saying that as a Metallica fan). And they could back it up on record, too. So seeing them descend to releasing an album that's just OK...it's actually kind of painful, especially when you consider that metal is not a genre which gets by purely on being just "OK"! And that's really the thing that breaks this album: it's just not a strong enough album to really recommend it.
Dave, you're a great musician and a strong songwriter, but, looking at this as objectively as I can, I have to say that you fucked up with this one. If you don't want to do thrash any more, please just release solo albums and let Megadeth rest, as you're not going to win over the guys who put the band on top of the thrash scene by releasing albums like this. If you do want to do thrash metal, then take some time to recharge your batteries before writing and recording the next album. There's no shame in taking a few years out to make sure you can release the best Megadeth album you can by doing a solo album or two to explore other styles of music while you get the best thrash metal you can ready in the vaults: some brilliant artists have done solo albums to allow them to explore other styles of music while they get the main albums for their bands ready to kick ass. Even if you don't want to take time off and want to rush into the studio, I encourage you to think about how a fan would react to the album before you try to release it. We aren't all grumpy people who just want thrash metal again and again: a lot of us just want a solid album at the end of the day and this, I'm sorry to say, isn't one.
Final Rating: 4 Out Of 10
While this is not a completely unlistenable album, it has some serious issues that drag it down and has so little quality material on it that it is not an album that is really worth checking out. Unless you can find this on sale fairly cheaply and have checked this out online first to see what your thoughts on the album are, I do not recommend picking this up.
Personal Highlights: "Kingmaker"
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