Back in January, one of my colleagues spent a good chunk of his review poking fun at the band’s name – and rightly so. There’s little point in going over it again here, though, not least of all because the name speaks for itself. Besides, there’s so much else to give this lot a good kicking for, and I’m not just talking about the fucking awful circa 1996 computer-generated over art. No, specifically I’m talking about the fact that this is pretentious metal twaddle of the highest order. Yes, of course the musicianship’s exemplary and the production is more polished than the royal silver, but it’s completely lacking in imagination.
Overblown and bloated, the stadium choruses – as burst from the dial-a-cliché ‘Forevermore’ – are fist-pumpingly epic and utterly predictable, especially if you’ve ever heard post ‘Black Album’ Metallica, from which ‘All That Remains’ could readily be an outtake.
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