Completion Makes the Tragedy

Some say that children say the strangest things, but as far as I’m concerned, the real saying out to be something more along the lines of “well known metal musicians get the strangest ideas in their heads when they get bored” when dealing with Coldseed’s debut “Completion Makes The Tragedy”. I’m not sure what the hell Thomen and Bjorn were thinking when they strung this bunch together, but trying to make sense of the results is quite a chore. As best as I can tell, they brought Blind Guardian’s two live backup musicians as charter members, recruited 2 no named guitarists from Spain, and proceeded to completely abandon any pretext of familiarity with their respective audience. What is heard on here has more in common with Fear Factory, Damageplan, and Pro-Pain than anything that either Soilwork or Blind Guardian have done previously, and the results are pretty lackluster, and at times downright ugly.

Perhaps the one area where the band shows some semblance of consistency is in their sound dichotomy of dull, muddy guitar chugs and spacey, techno-like keyboard gimmicks. The sound most clashes with itself on multiple levels, even more so than the worst albums put out by Fear Factory and Ministry. The few bright spots are where the band kicks up the tempo and trades out ripping off Pantera for borrowing from Nevermore, and it’s a marginal step up given that the two axe men in congress lack Jeff Loomis’ inventiveness and technical ability, though a couple of marginally decent solos occur like the one heard on “Low”, which also happens to be the best song on here in all its club rave meets Warrel Dane confusion. The vocal work is utterly schizophrenic, occasional conjuring up images of Phil Anselmo, at others Burton Bell, and occasionally like Ville Valo (as odd as that may sound), but going way overboard on the studio magic and overdubs, to the point of becoming a disjointed mess.

If every individual element of this album were pulled apart from the rest and put into a more appropriate musical context, they’d be average to moderately enjoyable, but this album just reeks of desperation to try something different without any regard for consistency. There is literally no one that I can think to offhand who I could recommend this to, save perhaps people who eat up the drivel that the Deftones have been churning out over the past decade. I think one of the reasons why the phrase “forgiveness is divine” rings so true to me is because it takes a forgiveness of near infinite proportions to excuse good musicians putting out crap like this. Thomen Stauch had been having a lot of personal and psychological issues at this point in his life, but figuring out Bjorn’s excuse for this will be one of those questions that will be pondered over for years to come.