New Album

Insomnium has released a new album called One For Sorrow. Every time I look at it, I think "one for the show, two to get ready, three to produce yet another decent melodic death metal album."

It's good. I don't think it's their best work, but it's good. My personal opinion is that they need to turn the "melodic" dial down a hair, and turn the "metal" dial up a hair. And the guitar sound is less pronounced; it has a more compressed and Marshall-y sound than usual - hence the need to adjust up the metal dial a tad. I happen to like the guitar sound on the album Sterling Black Icon by Fragments of Unbecoming. It may or may not be a good album, but I really like their guitar tone, especially on the song "Dear Floating Water." It's kind of thin and edgy, and I like that. (But apparently I'm a colossal hypocrite, because I also like the guitar sound on the Carcass song "Corporeal Jigsore Quandary", and there isn't anything thin about it. It is, in fact, the sound track of the apocalypse.)

But any new Insomnium is better than no new Insomnium, and the album is still worth a listen.

Every band produces a disappointing album at some point in their career. Some bands produce a great many disappointing albums. Some bands are just flat disappointing period. My benchmark for disappointing albums is the extremely disappointing The Great Burrito Extortion Case by Bowling For Soup.

And hey, here's good news: I didn't hear a single pinched harmonic on the entire album. Pinched harmonics, I contend, are to metal what trucker hats are to headgear, and always make me think of crappy 1980s hair "metal" like Bullet Boys or... oh, I can barely type it... Whitesnake...