HYPOCRISY

    Catch 22

   - 6 -

Well what can I say about HYPOCRISY's Nu - I'm sorry - new album?  Immediately, from the onset of the first track, the two words 'step down' come to mind.  What has happened to these guys?  I got into HYPOCRISY one day when I was in my local record store and bored with the music I had, I shelled out $14 for Penetralia.  Since that album, every HYPOCRISY album I have bought has been progressively worse.  This album simply continues the trend.

So what went wrong?  Well, musically this is, well, HYPOCRISY, though plus (and minus) some very interesting elements.  I think it is evident that the band are bored with their musical style, yet they have seemingly no idea how to remedy that problem.  Take the sound you heard of Into The Abyss and stretch it into a triangle.  One direction goes towards the Melodic Death camp, which is probably a bad idea, and this trend is evident in songs like "Uncontrolled" and "Edge of Madness" (Just about the only good tracks on the album).  The second direction goes to Hardcore, which is a prevalent sound on all tracks, especially "Turn the Page" and "A Public Puppet"  a very raw substituting-creativity-with-heaviness feeling, and making the album sound  almost dirtied.  The last one disturbs me: HYPOCRISY seem fairly intent on breaking into the Nu-Metal scene.  This could just be a side effect of the Hardcore edge they're portraying on this album, but their guitar sound, their quasi-clean-vocal choruses, and attempt at melodic singing have me convinced that while they're barely starting to go there, they're on the road to being Mall-Metal wannabes.

It sounds a lot like HYPOCRISY.  It acts a lot like HYPOCRISY.  Though I don't recall HYPOCRISY sounding so boring and forced, it feels as if every chord and riff they wrote on this album was forcibly extracted from their quivering heads, and there's just something missing in their energy that makes me almost think that they didn't really want to be playing.  It's a sad state for a band that has accomplished this much to be in, though let us also remember how long these guys have been around.  I do hope that they either come around on their next project or decide to go quietly off into that metal sunset, because we can't keep hearing this kind of music from a band I know can do better.
 
If you're a die-hard fan, you may want this album, and if you're into more commercial Metal (which I doubt few of our readers are) you would probably want to give this a try, but this just isn't the HYPOCRISY we know and love.  Oh well.  We still got a few good albums out of them, didn't we?
 

Editor's rating:   6
 
 

Contributed by Matt Gold

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