Album Review: Dymytry - "Five Angry Men"

It’s easy to want to like Dymytry.  There’s so much about the band that just feels right.  The presentation is sharp, the visuals are striking and evocative, the production on both of their albums has been top-notch, and the band’s burgeoning following in Europe should check all the boxes for a band that’s easy to fall for.  Especially on the heels of their debut “Revolt,” which didn’t break any molds, but promised that with a little maturity, greatness should inevitably manifest.

There’s something missing from their new album “Five Angry Men” though.  It’s damn hard to determine what that is, but there’s a spark that should ignite the flame of a passionate fandom that’s sorely lacking here.

To say that “Five Angry Men” is too calculating is wrong-headed, because no band should be criticized for having a thorough creative process.  And the album certainly doesn’t lack for authenticity, the band performs these songs as though they enjoy and are committed to them.  So it doesn’t sound fake, or anything truly incriminating like that.  Maybe the word for this record is ‘antiseptic.’  It’s just a little too clean, a little too predictable, a little too lyrically and thematically simplistic.  Having never heard the songs before, many of the lyrical rhymes and melodic permutations can be safely guessed by the listener.

That in and of itself isn’t necessarily a fault – we’ve spent pages here discussing that you can be a great artist by being transcendent at the familiar.  Still, “Five Angry Men” teeters too close to a sanitized, radio-clean Five Finger Death Punch for comfort.  (And it pains to mention but must be included – the chorus of “Wake Me Up (Before I Die,)” gets real Nickelback-y.)

Running down the tracklist of “Five Angry Men,” there is a temptation to brand several of the songs as store-brand versions of something else, but that’s not quite a fair criticism either, as there’s a whole stretch in the middle that resonates in a way the rest of the record doesn’t.

“Legends Never Die” is melodramatic in the extreme, and as much as that kind of affect often turns sour directly out of the carton, it works here.  The rubbery guitar tone helps separate the bridge from the giant, orchestral chorus and makes for an enjoyable quasi-industrial ballad, if such a thing can exist.  The record then careens into “Three Steps to Hell,” and the vaulted ceilings of “In Death We Trust,” both of which are the best examples of Dymytry flexing the muscles they use most.  Sure, there’s still a template of verse-big chorus-verse that’s hard to ignore, but this run in the middle of the record is where “Five Angry Men” gives glimpses of the kind of rock-industrial fusion that Dymytry is capable of.

Yet all that sounds like damning with faint praise, and maybe it is.  We talked at the end of last year about how Lord of the Lost, with their album “Blood and Glitter” finally put all the pieces together and made one great, cohesive effort.  Which is to say that Dymytry sits squarely where LotL was three years ago – they keep providing enough tantalizing morsels to hope for the future, but “Five Angry Men” isn’t a coming-out party.