Album Review: Metal Allegiance - Volume II

I never did review the first Metal Allegiance album, which was for two reasons. For one thing, I was (and still am) tired of albums with half a dozen different singers on them, since the odds of me liking them all is astronomically small. For another thing, I assumed it was going to be a one-and-done project, something that was done for the fun of it, but would never be followed up on. And yet, here we are with the second album ready to strike, so this time I might as well give them a chance to impress me. After all, with Mike Portnoy and Alex Skolnick the drivers of the group, there's enough reason to be mildly curious about what they are capable of coming up with. After all, there's something fascinating about those who usually don't write the band's songs now in charge of the creative process. So let's see what we've got here.

The lineup of guest vocalists this time around features Floor Jansen, Max Cavalera, Johan Hegg, and John Bush, among others. It's a list of heavy hitters, although they wouldn't be my first choices.

The most interesting track for me is "Bound By Silence", which features John Bush. Over the last few years, as Anthrax has returned to 'prominence' by peddling nostalgia, Bush's tenure with the band has been forgotten. That's a damn shame, since he is a capable singer, and those records are better than they get credit for. His voice still sounds modern, even though he's been around for thirty years. I don't always think it works for Armored Saint, but it fits right in with this heavier, thrashier music. Those five minutes are a pleasure to listen to.

The parts where the group stays true to the old thrash playbook work just fine. Singers like Bobby Blitz and Floor Jansen do a fine job of balancing out the sound and giving the songs some depth. The problem is that there are other tracks where the vocalists are too harsh, and the music becomes tedious in its dedication to being heavy at all costs. I am not a big fan of harsh vocals for the simple reason that they tend to completely strip away any sense of melody from the music, and that's what guys like Max Cavalera do. His track is an endless slog of barking that could easily be put on the next 'dogs sing metal' parody album.

This album falls victim to exactly what I assumed it would before I ever hit the play button. By collecting such a wide variety of vocalists to handle these ten tracks, the band might have been showing their wide-ranging love of metal, but they have backed themselves into a corner where it's incredibly difficult to love the whole record. I doubt many people are going to love Floor Jansen's operatic power, and then turn around and want to hear Johan Hegg's track that borders on being pure death metal. I know I didn't.

The band are capable instrumentalists, so the bones of these songs are solid. This sounds like a modern take on old-school thrash, which is exactly what it's supposed to be. It doesn't sound dissimilar to a newer Overkill record. But the vocalists make it come across as a jukebox, and not a 'band'. There is no uniting sound to grab onto, since it changes with each passing song. Maybe that's interesting if you're Portnoy, who is in ten different bands, but not for me when I want to sit down and listen to one thing at a time.

I realize that projects like this are fun for the musicians, but this one wasn't fun for me as a listener. John Bush's track is good, and Floor Jansen's is fantastic, but there's too much sludge and extreme metal creeping into the vocals for me to ever like this as more than a passing curiosity. Maybe people who are more purely into metal will have better success, but it isn't for me.