Review of Shadows Fall - Fire From the Sky

Here's an important thing to consider about Shadows Fall: Music is what they do for a living. More specifically, "trekking across the country to play shows at venues that seem a little less spacious than the ones they played eight years ago" is what they do for a living. Making albums is what allows them to do this job. This is not my way of suggesting that their latest, Fire from the Sky, is or even remotely sounds like a purely commercial effort, only that it sounds like an album made a band that doesn't have a ton to say anymore. Shadows Fall needed to make a new album because they need to tour. What results is a product that sounds totally competent but entirely lacking in the sort of creative energy that fuels those albums that are made because the creators know their skin will melt and their soul will burn for eternity in a pyre of unfulfilled need if they didn't make it.

But here's another thing to note about Shadows Fall: They're pretty good at their job. Not great, but good at it in the way that a civil servant who, despite being assaulted by decades worth of mundane indignities and insufficient office lighting, can still manage to spin the occasional dazzling trick of bureaucratic kindness. (The best riff of Shadows Fall's career might just be hidden at the two minute mark of "Lost Within," for example.) Fire from the Sky is the sound of Shadows Fall reporting to a job they're not really feeling any more, but they are still doing it pretty well because they've mastered the art of doing it pretty well.

Unfortunately, in a profession that revolves around getting somebody to feel something, just getting it done doesn't get it done. Shadows Fall's stout hybrid of thrash, metalcore and (broadly speaking) heavy metal barely moves the needle on any of Fire from the Sky's ten tracks. "Divide and Conquer" and "Weight of the World" are built from tired, forgettable riffs and pointless choruses. "Blind Faith" is a dull, balladic number that sticks around longer than necessary in the service of a parade of vocal and lead guitar tropes. All these songs are structurally sound, but are also mostly safe and dull.

In a lot of ways, Fire from the Sky is more sonically impressive than even the best Shadows Fall albums. (It's certainly clearer than the atrociously rendered Art of Balance.) Brian Fair sounds like a legitimate heavy metal vocalist now, staying in tune and deploying screams and melodic choruses with something bordering on grace. The players could always play, and with nearly two decades in their back pocket, they've only gotten more dexterous. A longtime friend of the band, Adam Dutkiewicz (Killswitch Engage) has a great sense of what Shadows Fall should sound like in the studio, and turns the knobs just right. But, everything ugly and immediate and pressing about the band's earlier albums has been ground away--not by some act of selling out or losing touch--but simply by the inexorable friction of time and work.

Seven albums into their career, it's hard to deny that Shadows Fall's moment has more or less passed. The band is no longer lauded by the mainstream press as the vanguard of an artistic movement--NWOAHM has long since fallen out of the common nomenclature--and they've been swept into the dustbin of history by a generation of fans that used their early albums as a stepping stone to more extreme fare. In a broad sense, Shadows Fall has ceased to matter as a heavy metal entity. There's a degree of freedom that attends that sort of commercial/cultural inconsequentiality that a more daring band might use to pursue creative pathways that were inaccessible during its commercial peak. Shadows Fall, instead, continues to be hewn to the middle path--adhering to the sound that made them marginally famous and then entirely insignificant.

Release Details

Shadows Fall

Fire From the Sky

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