German trio Fall of Carthage returns with their second album, the follow-up to 2014’s “Behold. The Longed For Reckoning” starts with Fast Forward. An aggressive, thrashy, Machine Head sounding opening number which is sure to draw your attention in. Frontman Sascha Aßbach‘s groove metal type vocals suit the heavy music perfectly.
They’re Alive is the first track to change the sound up. While the music stays in that thrashy/groove metal style, Aßbach’s vocals take on a heavier metal style sound changing into a more aggressive style (think David Draiman of Disturbed and Robb Flynn of Machine Head).
What you soon discover is: this is a very experimental album. There’s a very industrial sound to the drumming, most noticeably on tracks like Swept To The Edge and Suffer The Pain, but there’s also some hip-hop/rap/industrial songs like Whodini Peckawood and Puerile Scumbag. These are songs that are completely different to the rest of the record and, to be honest, don’t work, in my opinion. I’m not sure what they were trying to achieve here. It would’ve better if the whole album had a more rap feel to it rather than two songs thrown randomly onto the album.
Then there’s a song like Down Like Honey which, throughout most of the track, has a quote from Ghostbusters basically on repeat. Which quote do you ask? The one where Harold Ramis’ character says “don’t cross the streams. It would be bad.” While this is a funny line in the movie, it’s irritating having it constantly repeated at you in a song.
At sixteen songs, and nearly an hour long, this is an album which isn’t for everybody. It’s experimental and different to the straightforward thrash album I, and most people would be expecting. Especially after hearing the first few tracks on the album. While I applaud the fact that Fall of Carthage has tried to do something different here, and it does pay off at times, ultimately I felt left disappointed by the record.
