Catatonik
Rushing The Flame
5.1
Every city over the population of 40,000 has a band like Catatonik. Some boring band which usually never gets further than being an opening act and always manages to push half of the audience to the bar. Sadly enough, these bands always have some sort of a following, even if they're usually thirteen year olds.
It sounds like Drowning Pool if they stayed a local act. Yeah, I'm not joking. It's angsty nu-metal. Chugs and dissonant riffing included. During rests in the middle of the song, the singer actually says things like "motherfucker" during rests, almost raps, and adds this whiny sound to prelude a lot of his yells. Other than the aforementioned aspects and unfortunately coherent lyrics, he's not half bad in his delivery. In the pictures on their website, he's the guy wearing one of those black shirts with the little white writing which I can imagine says something clever like "you're just jealous the voices talk to me." The band only perpetuates their nu-metal stereotype with the clean singing on "Behind Your Eyes". "Beautifully Shattered" is by far the highlight of Rushing The Flame, as it's the only song with any sort of distinction, at least during the main verse. I really like what they're doing far more up until they reintroduce their boring moshy style, and even the lead-out is far more desirable to hear. "Rebuilt Myth" is decent, thanks to a slightly techy riff that preceeds the chorus. Then whatever respect I had for them is completely stripped away, thanks to "Tweaked", which features a "ahah! hah! hah! huh! huh!" vocal line.
So, Catatonik play...nu-metal really well. I'm serious. Unfortunately, playing a style of music that is inherently stagnant and dysfunctional doesn't earn you any points. I'm a firm believer in not reviewing albums that belong in a classification of music that I'm not a fan of to begin with. You probably won't catch me reviewing Iced Earth or Nevermore. But lets be honest with ourselves - have you ever really taken someone's opinion on heavy music seriously who's announced their unrestrained love for Nothingface? In other words, this is alright for the genre it's a part of, but unfortunately I can't think of anyone who would want to hear something that combines rapping with heavy riffs.
