Shadows Fall - Threads Of Life

NWOAHM ringleaders take a new tack

There are far too many albums shouting out for a headbanger’s 15 quid these days. The market is saturated with cookie-cutter metalcore, emo and hardcore acts of varying quality, and the good stuff is often hidden among the dross. Inventing tags like the ‘New Wave Of American Heavy Metal’ is one way of highlighting the interesting music, although the bands the NWOAHM tag covers (Massachusetts’ Shadows Fall are one) have had to work hard to merit the hype this has caused. After a couple of big-selling albums for Century Media, Shadows Fall, led by the mighty-lunged, massive-dreadlocked singer Brian Fair, have switched to Roadrunner and, fortunately for everyone, concocted a pretty decent album in Threads Of Life.

All the NWOAHM bands have struggled, usually unsuccessfully, to escape their common influences (Pantera, the commercial bits of Slayer, pre-Justice Metallica) but Fair et al have found a comfortable compromise between the usual semi-extreme riffage and a more widescreen, expansive sound that takes in reverb-heavy choruses and unhurried atmospherics. Obviously the shredding is pure Dimebag and the production crisply modern, but the songs and musicians repay this approach: listen out for Forevermore (an updated Maiden-style gallop) and Burning The Lives (a chance for Fair to sing rather than bellow).

The results of the new riff-plus-atmosphere approach are promising. The much-praised metalcore/mathcore scene-leaders Killswitch Engage did exactly the same thing on their last album, As Daylight Dies, and just look at them now. Let’s have more of this from those that can – and those that can’t, just retire right now please…

3 stars 3 stars 3 stars

Roadrunner | RR 80022

Reviewed by Joel McIver
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