Sevendust – Alpha

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Seven Bros. Records
Produced by John Connolly, Morgan Rose & Shawn Grove

Eight months after the North American release, Sevendust’s sixth studio album, their first on Seven Bros Records, is finally out in Europe with two extra tracks, with their second DVD due out at the same time and their seventh album due early next year.

Several bands started life around the same time in the mid ’90s who all share stylistic similarities but were able to pull in their own directions. Sevendust are one of the oldest of this little group, Godsmack and SOiL being two others with a sound close to theirs. All these bands make albums on short three and four minute songs and it is therefore quite a struggle to introduce much variation into their music. Godsmack have achieved it, SOiL haven’t, for example.

With opener Deathstar there is no hanging about. Everything starts at once, including the vocals and the track is all aggression with some neat guitar work that isn’t just a simple pummeling riff. Clueless follows quickly and is more melodic; a similar angry message, but more of a sing-a-long chorus. And so it continues. Initially Alpha is a very hard hitting, adrenaline-addled album, but repeated listens reveal tracks like Suffer, Alpha, Story of Your Life and Beg To Differ are re-treading identical ground to Clueless and Driven, and tracks like Under lose some of the maturity of the first three or four songs, with vocals far too close to young, trendy rock bands.

A bass-led Confessions of Hatred offers some promise of variation with a Stuck Mojo riff, and a slower, more considered mid section which certainly presents a nice change of pace, but the melodic vocals come with the requisite imprecise guitar backing that only serves to make those sections sound like any of the previous selections. Aggression similarly starts out with something different in a delicate piano intro which doesn’t fit the title of the track at all, but after that it’s the same stuff as before.

You might expect Burn to offer something different in it’s nine minute length, but even this one follows the same path set out by the rest of the album, it simply spends longer doing it. The two Europe-only bonus tracks are also more of the same. Each of these tracks is a tight slab of modern metal, and whenever they turn up in a random playlist they’re a welcome burst of aggression and riffing, but 14 of them back to back wears a little thin.

What this album could have done with is a couple of gritty acoustic tracks to break up the rest, or just a couple of heavy tracks that are played at a different pace or with a different delivery to the rest. All the songs are good, but something else is needed to break up.

“ re-treading identical ground ”

Tracklist: Deathstar / Clueless / Driven / Feed / Suffer / Beg To Differ / Under / Story of Your Life / Confessions of Hatred / Aggression / Burn / Alpha / The Rim / Abuse Me

Written by Andy Lye
More: Albums, Alternative, Sevendust