In Waves - Trivium - 2011

What a shitty couple of weeks for new releases. First Powerwolf bit, now Trivium blows. In Waves has been highly anticipated with predictions running all the way across the spectrum and I am saddened to admit that I now side firmly with the naysayers. In Waves is a terrible album. So very bad that, in my opinion, it utterly kills Trivium's momentum.

In Waves strips away anything and everything that was interesting about Trivium and fills in the gaps with soul-killing overproduction, repetitive and uninspired melodies and bursts of faux-heaviness that feel like forced afterthoughts. Somehow the band have become less than all the imitators who have followed them. How did they fall so spectacularly from the more-than-fine Shogun? The lead-off title track was a fitting preview of things to come and is easily the heaviest number on the album. And it was nothing to get excited over. If anything, it was great cause for concern. And upon the realization that there's nothing else as good to follow, In Waves feels so very, very empty. There's not a single noteworthy lyric and if the album has a theme, it has to be "Trivium for Dummies," coming across as a lazy sampler of sorts of the sounds that one may expect to encounter on a Trivium album without a single number even approaching the best that any one of the band's other records has to offer.

In summary, there's not a single thing here that's challenging. It's a mindless, soulless radio-ready set of anthems that will sound pretty good on a souped-up Accord's stereo system. With In Waves, Trivium have basically crafted a decent Foo Fighters facsimile. Guess they may be the next Metallica after all.