An amazing four albums in, and Winds of Plague have well and truly missed the boat - not sure what the kids are all jamming to now, but over-polished mosh (guest vocals from members of Terror and Hatebreed) is all kinds of 2003, superfluous, Cradle of Filth keyboard parts are 1997 and vanilla deathcore is ancient, carbon dated to 2007. Only using extremely creative maths can you get these component parts to equal 2011, which suggests that WoP should drop this whole pretence of zietgeist-hugging cruciality, like they're just on the cusp of being the next big thing. Seriously guys, Abigail Williams were far more hyped than you, combined some of the same elements, and they stopped being a valid band even before they released anything.
I'm not hatin' just for the sake of hatin', because I think Winds of Plague are the wrong kind of metal or something boring like that - I care for them and I want to help them, because they're very confused. And luckily, there is one remaining career path wide open to them, gaping like the Salaac, and the choice of narrator on 'Against the World' (WWE nobody the Ultimate Warrior, to the delight of manchildren everywhere, does a spoken word piece) and the preponderance of mid-paced groove metal plod ('Built for War' is wedged somewhere between Full Blown Chaos and one of those latter-Slipknot filler tracks that revolves around Corey Taylor's gruff barking) suggests they know it. Discard the admittedly pretty flimsy deathcore inclinations and the Ice Cream van keyboard jangling, and get yourself onto the mid-West college town circuit, playing to juggallos and rednecks with Pantera backpieces.
I could have put this comment in any of several reviews here, but thanks, Jimbo, for crystallizing my thoughts on this matter so eloquently. One of the reasons I love the music I love is because it sort of becomes my voice and an expression for me by way of people who have a line to the universe on such things. It's nice to find a writer who does much the same.
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