As many reviewers here have said, every now and then you get a great album which stands out from the drivel and makes you enjoy this job. Sadly, this isn’t the case here. London based Maxdmyz say they have a loose-fitting Industrial sound with a wide variety of musical influences which at a glance don’t seem to work well together (Pantera, Nile, Type O Negative, Rammstein etc) and the album is rather diverse – the band tries to cover several genre’s/stylings from electro-pop to progressive metal. No matter how many times I have tried to listen to this, it comes across as a Nu-Metal record… but not the good kind of Nu-Metal (yes, it exists, hard to find but it exists).
Listening through the album, you can hear the occasional influence or moment where it seems promising – The intro to “Cyanide”, the opening track has a kick to it and it does grab your attention and musically, this track sounds ok, but the vocals are for lack of a better or more positive sounding term – awful. The lead single “Grieve” is six minutes of something, not exactly sure what it is meant to be (and by the time this goes up, I still won’t be sure). The song has so much going on in it, it is hard to actually work out just what the band is trying to do here. A few great riffs are found and some decent drumming, but it just seems like the guys just did their own thing without working together on it and thought “yeah, that’ll do”. “Hate Injustice” has a decent stomp to it and a thick bass line, but the rap metal approach which has vocals similar to that of P.O.D just kills anything off the song may have had going for it.
“Nothing Ever Change” has some terrific drumming in it but the riffs just seem out of place on this track and the vocals are still distracting and in the bad way that no matter how much you try to pay attention to the rest of the track, you can’t help but think ‘what the hell is this awful mess?’. “Void” has a guest vocalist (Valentina Reptile) and does seem to start off promising but instead of trying something…say unique with the guest female vocalist, all they have her do is sing in that generic sound as a back up and rather low in the mix so she is only just heard when compared to the main vocalist. “A.K.A” is sample heavy and sounds lifeless in its intro, but it does pick up about a minute into the song, but it just chops and changes too much in its approach. “All” is described in the press-kit as ‘heart-core’ (???) and from what I can gather, it’s just a Nu-Metal styled song with an emo message to it. The bass is quite good in this one and the thick sounding guitar works well, but that’s really about it.
“Zog Choffin” has an interesting sound, almost Static-X like with that stop-start feel and hollow guitar sound but the song doesn’t seem to go anywhere. The vocals again are an issue, jumping from dramatic Fozzy-like to a moody low spoken section which doesn’t flow well or compliment the track well. “Side with Satan” is a track of “neo-gothic majesty” according to the press kit. I don’t know what that is, but what I do know it sounds like a nu-metal tribute to the Sisters of Mercy. The whole broody approach doesn’t work as the song feels too upbeat and for once the vocals aren’t too bad. “Turncoat Soul” has a thick guitar sounding intro and a slight groove to it from the drums but the really bad baritone vocals just don’t sit well at all, and when it speeds up and they flip to rap metal, it’s just… yeah, let’s leave it at that. “First Coming” closes the album (thankfully) and like the rest of the album, it just doesn’t make much sense and when one part sounds promising, everything else either hinders it or ruins it completely.
“The Hate Plane” is awful. It’s almost like all the members of Maxdmyz have said “Let’s all do what we want, not think it through or converse with each other and just record it!” This album is a clear case of ‘too much going on’ – it’s good to have a variety of influences and to want to play a variety of styles, but pick a handful and stick to it. The constant jumping about from song to song and even within the songs just makes the album seem ill-thought and if the band had actually settled on a direction and stuck with it, they might have caught my attention for the right reasons. There are two bonus tracks, they’re just remixes of ‘Hate Injustice’ (thrash mix) and ‘Grieve’, both like their actual track counterparts and this album are unremarkable.
In closing, I’d avoid this album. Not even a few drinks when listening to it could make it seem interesting, and usually beer can make most things sound good.
(1/10 Fraggle)
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