I’d like to think that in all the years I’ve listened to heavy
\nmetal, I’ve heard the angriest forms of music that man could ever
\ncome up with. But sometimes, even that can be taken to too far of
\nan extreme.<\/p>\n
Take the self-titled debut release from Amen, for example. This
\nis 14 tracks of brutal, naked anger that the band tries to channel
\nthrough their instruments. One problem, though – you have to have
\nsome kind of a safety valve when playing with such a combustible
\ncombination, and Amen have yet to learn how to try and balance out
\nthe anger.<\/p>\n
Oh, don’t get me wrong; I know that Amen – vocalist Casey Chaos
\n(where
\ndo<\/i> they think of these names?), guitarists S. Mayo and Paul
\nFig, bassist Tumor, John and drummer Larkin – went all-out to
\ncapture the absolute fury that they feel. They shout, scream, pound
\non their instruments and make every conceivable noise known to rock
\nmusic in the process – and the end result, while musical in some
\nsemblance, is pretty hard to listen to.<\/p>\n
Part of it seems to be that Amen rejects everything that is
\nmodern-day society, writing them off as evils that must be stomped
\nlike a cockroach. Tracks like “Coma America,” “Unclean,” “TV Womb”
\nand “No Cure For The Pure” all seem to point in that direction – at
\nleast what I could decipher from Chaos’s balls-in-a-blender
\nscreams.<\/p>\n
There are two major problems with
\nAmen<\/i> that I can hear. First, the band needs to realize that
\na constant sonic attack on the listener will eventually lead them
\nto start tuning out the message – and this is the opposite effect
\nof what Amen wanted to accomplish. Even a band like Rage Against
\nThe Machine realizes that you have to occasionally push the
\n“depressurize” button to kind of bring the listener back to some
\nlevel of status quo before you go after the jugular.<\/p>\n
The second problem – and this is the fatal mistake that the band
\nmakes – is that they don’t seem focused enough on the music to make
\nthe album that effective. Instead, it sounds like the sessions were
\nused to pound out the tracks and to be a form of primal scream
\ntherapy. I mean, if I wanted to hear things like that, I’d go pick
\nup the first solo albums from John Lennon and Yoko Ono.<\/p>\n
This is all a shame, because somewhere in the haze of pissed-off
\naggression and full-throttle sloppy playing, I do hear potential
\nfor Amen to release an album that will knock people out of their
\nshoes. Unfortunately, this isn’t it.<\/p>\n
2000 Christopher Thelen and “The Daily Vault”. All rights
\nreserved. Review or any portion may not be reproduced without
\nwritten permission. Cover art is the intellectual property of
\nRoadrunner Records, and is used for information purposes only.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25265,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[6247],"rating":[11203],"class_list":["post-36471","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-amen","rating-rating-d-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/36471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/36471\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36471"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=36471"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=36471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}