Squealer A.D.

Confrontation Street

Written by: PP on 19/12/2006 17:48:49

The loss of a singer is a tough deal on any band, but losing a singer in a car accident in the middle of the songwriting process of a new album is a big deal on any band and guaranteed to influence the lyrics and the sound of a band for the remainder of their life cycle. Without having prior knowledge to Squealer it's hard to judge how much the sound has changed, but considering they decided to change the name to Squealer A.D. instead tells a story of a band with great respect to their late singer.

Squealer A.D. is a band with not much regard to originality. Their thrash-influenced violence metal is mostly a safe bet, as the guitars never venture outside the standard simple riffing. This is effective on some tracks, such as on "Infanticide" where the high-tempo blurred guitars are hammered into your mind together with new vocalist Gus Chambers' violent, angry clean shouts, but on others, such as the slow "Eat My Sin", they merely leave you scratching your head and wondering what on earth the band attempted to achieve with those odd guitar effects that would feel misplaced even on a Limp Bizkit record. The band has some obvious attempts at copying the mighty Judas Priest on some tracks, and while being influenced by a band like Priest isn't wrong, copying them straight-up on the riff-structure/vocal and trying to merge this onto a modern, somewhat nu-metallish sound is plain criminal.

The main problem with "Confrontation Street" is its lackluster nature. Many of the songs are powerful and crushing, but don't provoke any musical arousal in the listener. It is about as untrendy and uncool as you can imagine, sounding like a Linkin Park thrash metal experimentation gone horribly wrong. "Infanticide" and "New Sun Rising" are two tracks which are at least remotely interesting due to their speedy and somewhat memorable riff-sequences, but the rest of the tracks fade into a grey mass and lack some serious identity, just like the album overall. And if anyone from AFM records reads this: F*** YOU for shortening the songs 25-30seconds to prevent 'piracy', as if "Confrontation Street" would be bought by anyone else than previous fans of the music anyway, it just makes the reviewer's job harder.

4

Download: Infanticide, New Sun Rising
For the fans of: Judas Priest, Grip Inc, Godsmack
Listen: N/A

Release date 23.10.2006
AFM Records
Provided by Target ApS

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