Going into this record, I was a big fan of Killswitch, having been impressed by what I’d heard off their previous two records. Unfortunately, this record almost took them out of total rotation for me. After coming off the road for 2004’s The End Of Heartache, the band was seemingly rushed into the studio to come with a follow-up to be released for the busy 2006 holiday shopping season. Entering the studio that summer, they quickly came up with this record, which lacks any major melodies or notable songs (with the exception of two songs).
Those two songs were, of course, the singles “My Curse” and “The Arms Of Sorrow,” the two songs that actually manage to sound like good Killswitch. “My Curse” is along the lines of classic Killswitch: amazing harmonies and screaming from frontman Howard Jones and great guitar work. “The Arms Of Sorrow” on the other hand is more of a ballad with raw emotion and some great musicianship. The other tracks sound like generic heavy metal from the mid-2000s with nothing really memorable about many of them to justify remembrance after the CD is over.
Several songs end up sounding like tossed aside ideas stretched into four minutes of song, “Daylight Dies” being the perfect example of this. Most bands should know that’s not the way to put an album together. Fortunately, the members of Killswitch learned their lesson over their next couple of records. Their most recent, 2013’s Disarm The Descent, is their best album in years.
While the riffing of Joel Stroetzel and Adam Dutkiewicz is on par with other great metal guitar duos, it’s just not enough to pull the record out of blandness. Killswitch is a band most metalheads either love or hate, but this record was a bitter taste for most to swallow.
Unfortunately, songs like “This Is Absolution” and “Break The Silence” don’t really have anything going for them in any way except as a way of giving the listener a chance to skip ahead to the next track. In the end, this was a record that was fast tracked to the market and it still sounds like it all these years later. It’s a record that’s better to leave off the discography.
