Review by UnhinderedbyTalent for Sevendust - Animosity (2001)

My flirtation with The Gateway clan has waned over the past year or so.  However, that having been said I think Bad Omen's latest release might just be my most played album of the year and I do still spin Niratias by Chevelle on a regular basis following its release last year.  Still, I do not now engage with much of this clan even though for a period in the late 90s and early noughties I was listening to the likes of Korn, Linkin Park and grunge acts such as AiC and Soundgarden on a daily basis.

In Sevendust I found a happy medium I guess between a record that is not shying away from being alternative but at the same time lacks any real sense of panache when it comes to song writing overall.  But let us start with a huge positive in the vocals of Lajon Witherspoon.  His cool and tuneful voice is the standout item on Animosity.  The irony being that his voice hardly evokes any sense of animosity given that it possesses a smoothness that sounds like he could roll icing out from between his vocal chords at times.  The more aggressive tracks leave me to think that he most certainly has depth in his abilities (if not necessarily able enough for me to describe that depth as range of any sort).  In keeping with the vocal performance, I find the riffs here of equal aptitude.  When they put their mind to it, Sevendust can let rip with the old six-strings whilst also weave some of those hazy nu-metal notes in there also from time to time.  These two elements alone make for some memorability without ever managing to convey much in the way of excitement or intrigue in what I am hearing.

Animosity is very much an album that I would not come back to.  After giving it more than a few listens ahead of this review I cannot say there is anything remarkable here and it really just sounds like an awful lot of other music that was floating around at the time.  The song writing can actually sound quite lazy at times with clunky structures such as Xmas Day really bringing nothing positive to the table.  As a result the album lacks completeness and suffers from the dreaded sense that this is a collection of songs as opposed to an album.