Does anyone remember when The New Wave Of American Heavy Metal was a thing? At the start of the 21st century, various publications latched onto the latest wave of American metalcore and pushed it for all it was worth as bands like Killswitch Engage, Trivium and Avenged Sevenfold garnered the sort of publicity they retain today. As time has passed, these bands are still doing well for themselves and haven’t quite passed into self-parody like the aftermath of the nu-metal explosion (see: Limp Bizkit’s ‘Gold Cobra’ and Korn “inventing dubstep”). Simmering away just under the surface of the hype have been Shadows Fall, ever-present in the rise and petering-out of metalcore, and here they unleash seventh album ‘Fire From The Sky’.
As with a lot of bands seven albums in, it’s what one may call a “career album”. Shadows Fall aren’t looking to make the next ‘Master Of Puppets’, the next ‘Reign In Blood’; hell, they’re not even out to make the next ‘The Blackening’. Fire From The Sky plays to Shadows Fall’s long-established strengths, pulls no wildcards from the pack, and makes all the right moves to stake their claim as a relevant band in 2012 – a decade on from the their genre’s rise to prevalence.
‘The Unknown’ kicks off the proceedings in fine fettle, and is Shadows Fall-by-numbers stuff – Brian Fair’s harsh bark interplaying with Matt Bachand’s clean vocal over squealing guitar work sitting firmly in the company of the stylings of Maiden and the Scandinavian masters. Following on from more radio-friendly stylings of 2007’s ‘Threads Of Life’, this band have clearly rediscovered how to write quality heavy metal again, as evidenced by the title track ‘Fire From The Sky’ – it nods to associates such as Chimaira at their best, whilst also finding the type of thrash groove Metallica have failed to rediscover for about the last 15 years. ‘The Wasteland’, however, is the track that ensures this record’s replayability status; a dark, malevolent stomp that gains lyrical inspiration from T.S. Eliot of all people and really stretches this band’s strengths to the best of ability – playing this album out on a exciting note of what may be to come from the Massachusites.
The record is far from perfect; lyrically it has no real flair (being predominately themed around this year’s hot topic of the Mayan calendar’s prediction of the apocalypse) and the latter stages of the album – other than the aforementioned ‘The Wasteland’ – are a little predictable. ‘Blind Faith’ in particular is about 2 minutes too long and contains no real spark of invention. All things considered, this may be Shadows Fall’s most compentent effort since 2004’s magnum opus “The War Within”. Killswitch Engage guitarist Adam Dutkiewicz, himself a former member of this band, has done a fine job of production here and the ‘Fire From The Sky’ joins 2012’s class of solid, if a tad unspectacular, metalcore records.
OLLIE CONNORS