Album Review: Leverage - DeterminUs

Ten years is a long time. We have all aged, the world has gone through tremendous upheaval, and our memories aren't what the used to be. So unless you're a band at the scale of Tool, being absent from the scene for that long is not a recipe for success. Leverage is returning after a decade away, with a couple of new members in tow. I suppose one could ask if this is even the same band that we may or may not remember. I'll say right now I don't remember their previous releases, so I'm not going to address that last question. I will note, however, that with every year between albums, the expectations for the end product get higher. When you only have to write one great song per year to fill out your record, there's not much excuse if the result isn't amazing.

Leverage occupies an odd place on the spectrum with this record. They are playing melodic rock, of course, but it's laced with bits of AOR, heaps of prog, and bits and pieces from Magnum. Wrapped up in a package of songs that often hit six or seven minutes, there is certainly a lot going on here.

"Wind Of Morrigan" is a good example of what Leverage is up to. There's an acoustic opening that is almost a sea shanty, a main electric riff that has a folk feeling, and a chorus that layers vocals into a huge sounding hook. There's a degree to which it sounds like a heavier version of Big Big Train, which is an interesting approach. And then as soon as that song is over, the first sounds of "Tiger" are a more grinding metal riff, that eventually leads to some gruff vocals that are completely out of place on this kind of record.

New singer Kimmo Blom has a voice that is rough around the edges, but has some versatility. What he can't do, though, is sing aggressively without the strain in his voice becoming overbearing. Unfortunately, he likes to pepper the heavier moments on the record with that style of vocal, which I find distracting every time he does it. He's good when he sticks to delivering the melodies, but for whatever reason the entire band is dead-set on proving some degree of metal, rather than sticking to the melodic hard rock they're better at.

Just listen to the opening of "Afterworld's Disciple" for an example of this. Over just the bass and drums, Kimmo bellows, his voice warbling with the same awkward tenor as Udo Dirkschneider, whose appeal has always struck me as being due to him coming out when few metal singers could actually sing. With the band pulled back, Kimmo sounds worse than ever, as the volume isn't able to cover up the uncomfortable parts of his voice. Like Udo, or later Nils Patrick Johansson, I can't listen to vocals like this and hear the song underneath the performance. They are too distracting, too unpleasant.

When we do focus on the songs, they can't overcome the other shortcomings. After getting off to a good start, the album quickly falls into a rut of heavy riffs and mediocre melodies. After ten years, I expect so much better than this. There is too much filler here for any album, really, but especially one that has had so much time to write and collect material for. I don't know what these guys have been doing for the last decade, but clearly all of it wasn't spent writing songs. There shouldn't be any way that a song as flat and boring as "Hand Of God" gets put on an album along with the best stuff a group has been writing over the course of a decade. I'm sorry, but for all the flaws it had, even "Chinese Democracy" at least sounded like a record that had years of indecision and work put into it.

Leverage isn't even interesting in the car-crash way.