Album Review: The Three Tremors - The Three Tremors

Let's get this out of the way at the start; The Three Tremors is a horrible band name, for two reasons. First, it just sounds terrible. The connotation is either that the band is as welcome in your life as an earthquake, or they want to be associated with the cheesy sci-fi movie that is currently so popular that attempts to reboot it keep failing. Second, these guys have taken the name that was associated with the long-desired project that would have brought Bruce Dickinson, Rob Halford, and Geoff Tate (originally Ronnie James Dio) together. So these three have taken the name that was supposed to belong to three singers they can't put the batteries in the microphones for, and I'm not supposed to now compared each and every note of this record to what they would have done? Sorry, but when you invite the comparison, the baseline for this record is Dickinson's song, "A Tyrrany Of Souls", which he has said he wrote for that project. If these guys can't live up to that standard (which is going to be damn hard), all they've done is damn themselves.

So who do we have stepping into this fire? We have Tim 'Ripper' Owens, owner of a good voice that has sung on a large amount of the blandest metal of the last twenty-five years. He is the personification of the word 'generic'. We have Harry Conklin, who has long fronted Jag Panzer. If you're asking yourself, "who?", that's the point. And spearheading the whole thing, and writing all of the music, we have Sean Peck of the band Cage, who have rightfully spend their entire career toiling away in the underground. The promise of this album, given all of that, is generic heavy metal with a lot of high-pitched shrieking. Don't I look excited?

In fact, the very first thing we hear on this album is one of those shrieks. They waste no time getting to the throat-shredding, which gives us no opportunity to warm up to what they're doing before we're thrust headlong into it. I'll be honest here; I am not, and have never been, a fan of super high screaming. I find it a very annoying vocal style, both because it physically hurts to listen to too much of it, but also because it's nearly impossible to properly enunciate the lyrics when you're at the very top of your range.

The other factor is that those vocals are so associated (at least in my mind) with King Diamond that I find it hard to take them seriously. They come off to me like a character in a cheesy stage play, and not something that is 'heavy' or 'cool'. Screaming your balls off isn't metal, it's the vocal equivalent of Yngwie Malmsteen shredding his arpeggios so fast you can't even tell what the notes are supposed to be.

Basically, this album comes across much like Judas Priest's recent "Firepower", but with far more high vocals. That's not just because Ripper is here. The songwriting largely comes from the "Painkiller" mold, which says that relentless pounding and screaming is a suitable replacement for melodies and hooks. "Invaders From The Sky" and "Bullets Of The Damned" get things started with that formula, and neither one of them has a melody that is memorable, mainly because the notes are so high they blend together.

It doesn't help that all the high vocals sound the same. There isn't enough differentiation between Peck and Ripper's high register, which makes having both of them here a gimmick more thna a necessity. Conklin does stand out a bit more, but mostly because his voice sounds like it's giving out trying to reach the notes on "When The Last Scream Fades". And the title of that song calls back to one of my biggest pet peeves in rock and metal. If you're writing about screaming, it pretty much concedes your screaming isn't getting the job done.

As I mentioned earlier, "A Tyrrany Of Souls" is the one song we know was written for the real heavy metal trinity, and it looms over this album like the Sword Of Damacles. Not only is there not a single track that can hold a candle to that amazing song, there isn't anything that could sit on the same record. These songs aren't even good enough to be filler on a great record. The only way this record is "one of the great power metal records", as the press release states, is if the only metal you know is "Jugulator". That record is actually an apt comparison.

What galls me most about a record like this is how they bring together three voices when one would suffice. It's all a gimmick, but it isn't one that is well thought out. When Tobias Sammet brings people in for Avantasia, they all serve a purpose, and they give the songs something he couldn't on his own. On this record, all three singers could handle all the vocal parts easily on their own. Their voices are similar, which makes the whole point of them teaming up irrelevant. If you played this record for someone who isn't intimately familiar with these guys, I would imagine many of them wouldn't even notice it wasn't one singer the whole time.

I didn't like The Three Tremors from the derivative nature of their name, and I like them even less after listening to the record. This is the kind of poorly-written heavy metal that only appeals to people who think 'heavy' is a synonym for 'good'. If you're one of those people, yeah, you're probably going to like The Three Tremors. If you're a listener who doesn't want to be screamed at for an entire record without hearing a single melody, this record is more along the lines of the natural disaster the name implies. No, it's not terrible, but it's pointless. And in some ways, that's even worse.