May 2020 Feature Release - The Revolution Edition

It's now May which of course means that we'll be nominating a brand new monthly feature release for each clan. This essentially means that we're asking you to rate, review & discuss our chosen features for no other reason than because we enjoy the process & banter.     

This month's feature release for The Revolution is 2014's third album from Swedish trance metal outfit Amaranthe  entitled "Massive Addictive". It's one of the more well-known & highly celebrated releases for the trance metal subgenre & we'd like to hear your thoughts on it.

I just did my review. Here's a summary of it:

Love them or hate them, Amaranthe is one of the most diverse Swedish metal bands, and not totally in the progressive sense. I'm one of those people who love the band, and I've been listening to them for 3 years now. They sure know how to trance-ify melodeath and power metal, and have toured all over Europe and America. Many metal purists accuse them of "ruining metal", but really they just wanna help bring metal and harsh vocals to the masses, no matter the mainstream cost. And even though this album isn't as perfect as their previous two albums, Massive Addictive can be hailed a successful breakthrough in trance metal! The album is both heavier and trance-ier than the previous two, with some songs having more metal than trance and vice versa. A few of the more electronic songs are a dreadful foreshadowing of the overpowering trance infecting their later albums, but the songs I love the best in the album are when the trance and metal are in perfect balance. There are also two or three clean-sung ballads. Oh yeah, we can't forget the unique vocal trio of new harsh vocalist Henrik Englund, the power metal-esque Jake E. Lundberg, and the angelic Elize Ryd. Overall, Massive Addictive is a strong album, though not as perfectly strong as their previous two albums, and Amaranthe continue finding more uniqueness for their sound. Even though I'm an extreme metalhead, I wouldn't recommend it to other fans of that kind. As long as people stay open-minded, anyone who is a fan of pop/dance/rock/metal would love this. Those fans would almost never want those 41 minutes refunded!

4.5/5

As I mention in my review, I am a complete pleb when it comes to trance metal. My original conclusion was that it would sound like a heavier version of the similarly named electronic dance music genre and the rest would fall into place, but I don't really get that from Massive Addictive.

Now to be fair, my opinion on what classifies as "trance music" is vastly different from most so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I still do like some of what's going on here. The melodies are pretty nice in small doses, the production is mostly solid beyond some blaring synths and the male and female vocals create some pretty decent chemistry.

When I think of getting lost in a trance, I think of a genre such as shoegaze; one that locks the listener into a sleeplike, hypnotic state with its wall of sound production style and this album doesn't give me that, but then again, trance music doesn't give me that feeling at all anyway! When I need trance music, I listen to an artist like deadmau5 in the techno/house side of electronic music. I would love to get some more guidance as to where I could look to find a better understanding of trance metal as a whole!

6/10

As someone who wasn't too impressed by 2018's Helix and only enjoyed their cover of Powerwolf's "Army of the Night" as a guilty pleasure, I can say that this is probably Amaranthe at their best. Making accessible Metal is difficult, since a lot of Metal genres at their core are made to be inaccessible! With 12 tracks all at 3 and a half minutes and all having huge hooks and choruses, this album is basically begging to be played on mainstream radio, and that's perfectly okay! What separates this album from other albums vying for mainstream playtime, though, is that it still has the things people love about Metal mostly intact. The guitar tone is chunky and chugs well, the harsh vocals aren't laughably bad, the band in general has a great energy to them, there are some good guitar solos, and the balance between synth melodies and the rest of the band is well done.

It's pretty repetitive though, with the band having one or two ideas and rolling with them through the entire album, but since the songs are so short and don't try to overstay their welcome I don't really have a problem with it. Elize Ryd's vocals can come off as a bit flat sometimes but I think she works wonderfully as a front woman and has enough power behind her voice that it doesn't feel thin and compliments the piano and synths very well. Massive Addictive is a surface level album though, and even though it does what it set out to do very well, there's nothing too crazy on this one. This is a great recommendation for anyone who wants some electronics in their Metal and for a "mainstream album" this is pretty dang good. I'd rather listen to this every day of the week rather than what's on mainstream Hard Rock radio nowadays, which I'm pretty sure is like...Godsmack. Or Breaking Benjamin. Or Disturbed. 

3.5/5