The Analyst
Summoning The Wretched
6.8
There's nothing at all wrong with the full length debut from Indiana’s The Analyst except for the fact I’ve heard it 437 times already this year.
Heavier than usual, melodic death metal tinged metalcore that will appeal to fans of early The Black Dahlia Murder, All Shall Perish, Sons of Azrael, At The Throne of Judgement, Through the Eyes of the Dead, Sea of Treachery, My Children My Bride, Stigma, Woe of Tyrants, Ghost of Fallen Age, The Classic Struggle, She Killed Poetry, Eternal Lord, The Storm, A Breath Before Surfacing, I Killed The Prom Queen, Hereafter An Odyssey–want me to keep going? Kinda get where I’m going with this review?
Not quite as burly and brutal as the likes of Whitechapel/Carnifex etc, but not pure metalcore, The Analyst are competent, but their sound is just so dang cookie cutter and familiar, I could not pick any of their songs out of a pack of similarly themed bands. The vocals are mostly a commendable deeper death metal roar, with a few screams, plenty of galloping melodic death metal dual riffs, a few breakdowns and a smattering of solos (though never on the sweep arpeggio levels of All Shall Perish or The Human Abstract). The result is indeed a solid, but wholly unoriginal album from a group of kids that have some skill and know their sound, but ply it with such a sense of predictability it almost makes the album redundantly cookie cutter, and it simply won't rise above the mass of similar bands as they stand now.
Which is a pity as tracks like the title track, “Throne of Phyruss” and closer “Inhuman Existence” (along with its clichéd but nicely down intro/outro) have some enjoyable moments that warrant the attention of fans of any of the bands above, but by the same token, you have already heard those exact moments if you own albums by any of the bands above. Plus, those tracks I mentioned are the last third of the album, meaning hardly anything on the album's early and mid stages grab my attention (though "Yhe Black Gate" and "Inclusion Body" try awful hard at times), despite the overall level of competence. In fact (and I can’t vouch for the timeline or lineups of the material) something definitely changes and ‘clicks’ in the direction of more pure melodeath and less ‘core’ in the album's latter stages.
Again, not a bad album at all, it's well produced and well played, bit it's just an album you’ll have to take as is, being fully aware that you’ve heard it before already-several times if you like the genre.
