Dominate the Human Strain

Novembers Doom review is up. General gist of it: fantastic death-doom. Highly recommended. (click here for review)

Meanwhile, went to the Lamb of God/Trivium/Machine Head/Gojira tour last night. Gojira were good, although the crappy Wiltern sound sucked out a lot of the nuances, leaving it just sort of a rumbling din. Machine Head were fantastic as usual. No surprise there. Lamb of God still fail to interest me much. I like the idea of the band. I just don't like their music. Good energy, but nothing grabs me.

The really illuminating performance belonged to Trivium. Now, I've seen them live before, touring off their last record. Seeing them play stuff from The Crusade live, though, crystallized my thoughts on the band's new direction: they're basically like a bunch of kids playing "thrash band." They ran around on stage like excited puppies, wanting the audience to love them. The new songs were a lot of fun, retarded lyrics aside (DRAGON!), but it struck me as sort of like going to see an 80s metal cover band. However, after seeing the songs live, I do like the album more now that I've sorted that out for myself. Unless there's someone obvious I'm not thinking of, it seems like they've basically invented pop thrash.