New Protection

If you're ever feeling down about yourself, thinking you're not good enough, you can at least feel reassured in the fact that at least you are not one of the people from Ride the Sky, and at least you didn't have a hand in making this abomination. I'm going to keep this review pretty short, because if the band didn't want to take their time writing better music, why should I even bother going into depth on why this is so bad? But enough about that, let's dig into this stinker:

Ride the Sky are barely even a Metal band at all, only really qualified on the virtue of the fact that one of their members was in Helloween and helped create The Dark Ride...oh, and they have a few electric guitar solos and whiddly synths in there, sometimes. The album title sounds like a condom advertisement, and the cover artwork pretty much makes no sense at all. Every song here pretty much sounds the same, and while I'll give this points for the title track being listenable and catchy, the band never really kicks it up a notch. Every song has the same poppy, distorted fuzz in the background, and a faceless layered chorus with its crosshairs dead set on radio airplay, and some distorted lumps that are almost riffs. The problem isn't the fact that this is poppy, but the fact that this is small. Metal is supposed to sound larger than life and bold, no matter what subgenre you're looking at. Ride the Sky are insignificant and petty, making soulless pandering into an art form every time they trudge through another wimpy chorus. And this album just keeps going and going, too! It's absolutely agonizing, especially with the band's dreadful attachment to that ever-popular "depressive" lyrical mind-set. Oh, yes, you can tell these guys think they are dark, tormented and all around misanthropic, as they are far too removed from reality to ever include something as silly as actual emotion or feeling in their music. No, that would be downright crazy! Ride the Sky are hardened to the ways of life in all its blackened, frayed anguish, and they intend to express this through their music with the most stoic of facial expressions and the blackest of Hot Topic clothing - with the tags not removed, of course. How will we ever get out of this one?

But music as an art form has won again, as Ride the Sky disbanded last year because they didn't sell enough records, so I don't see a point in mincing words anymore. New Protection fucking sucks, a degenerate piece of pomped up plastic garbage that amounts to little more than a pimple on a pimple on a pimple on the ass of the Power Metal scene. If you think this is any good, you should be ashamed of yourself. As for me, I'm done with this.