SuperSpaceSheep

If there's one thing that I can trust Devin Townsend to do, it's make music that he feels like making. And right now, it seems like he's in the mood to make some uplifting hard-rockin' rock n rollarooni rock songs. At its best, this album sounds like a familiar retread of the more generic tracks from Sky Blue or Epicloud, or Transcendence, or Empath... At its worst, it's embarrassing, as with tracks like Knuckledragger and Gratitude. The one exception to this rule ... read more

This album is a great showcase of how versatile a vocalist Phil really is. We have some clean singing on The Air That I Breathe and It Dwells In Me, some grindcore gurgling on The Weak Willed, and a few odd shrieks throughout the record. But outside of these moments, you're going to hear the same metalcore screams and sk8ter boi whining you're used to with the genre, and the same metalcore "riffs", and "breakdowns", and every other metalcore convention, down to the ... read more

Any credit I could give to the band's debut is lost here, as they step away from their death metal roots and dive headfirst into uninteresting metalcore cliches. Despite the album featuring some pleasant clean-vocal passages on For Salvation and Focus Shall Not Fail, Phil's -core screams are insufferable nine times out of ten. The music is still well-produced, the band are still talented musicians, but once your boring -core strumming ends, I don't really care how good your solo ... read more

I feel like each song here has some kind of appeal, but I can't really imagine being a fan, liking EVERY song here, because there is so little quality control. The opening track Prayer suggests the band have immediately sanitized their sound after their debut, before the following Liberate strikes a fair balance between familiar aggression and the more melodic sound of this record. Lyrically, the album is much more personal than the dark tales of abusers and psychopaths from their debut, ... read more