Titans of Creation

Testament is a highly respected band in the metal world. I guess that the main reason to that is that they most of the time have been staying true to their roots of bay area thrash metal. Also their lineup consists of 5 individual and outstanding persons, each of them is talented and fulfill their role greatly. So I’ve been wondering: why do I feel like there is always something missing in their albums to call them masterpieces?

The band had a pretty high bar this time. Their last effort, Brotherhood of the Snake was very well received and in my opinion is a solid record. We knew from the first sounds of Night of the Witch single that this one will represent a different style. And that’s a good thing to me. But did they manage to keep the level of the 2016’s release? It’s really hard to tell, since my impressions are mixed.

Titans of Creation starts with a (I could tell) signature riff for Testament. From the first notes you know what band you are listening to. And the song is also pretty straightforward and catchy so I think that it works well as an opening track. I also pointed out when I was playing the album for the first time that it has some old-school elements that make you think about the early Testament’s releases. But even in this matter I have mixed feelings since some moments were so familiar to me that I almost wanted to sing “So practice what you preach!”.

But you will be disappointed if you think that the rest of the album will be as straightforward and old-school as the opening track. I didn’t expect it to be, but also didn’t expect myself to be very enraptured and delighted about some songs and very disappointed by the others.

On one hand, you have the song City of Angels with very outstanding and thought bass lines.
I feel like they’re touching my heart in soft points. You also have a very catchy and melodic song Dream Deceiver that feels really creative in the matter of songwriting to me. On the other hand, you have parts were you can feel like the same line or riff is being repeated in eternity. And even if the songs itselves are good, you can’t pick them up well while listening to the whole album because of it’s biggest disadvantage: it’s overly long.

Seriously, why they decided to put 11 songs on the album (and the 12. outro track), while most of them are about 5 minutes long? In my opinion it kills some really good songs. They could just leave some of them for some EP, or even next album. I feel like this record lacks on one feature that every album needs to have to be good: not only consisting of good songs, but also being coherent as a whole. It also seems like they found out about it in the end of the creating process and decided to “patch” it by adding the instrumental outro song Catacombs. And it made it even worse. The song is epic and create an outstanding atmosphere, but seems pointless. I think that it could work more well if there was also a similar intro track.

But as I said, my impressions are very mixed, so I found also an enormous advantage: Eric Peterson’s vocals. Man, why he have started doing them only now? His black and death metal inspired voice adds freshness and extremeness to the songs. In fact, I think that Eric’s vocals is the most fresh element on the whole record. And I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that I rate the songs where he sings the highest.

Summarizing my thoughts, I think that Titans of Creation is an interesting record with a good concept, but it was partly destroyed by adding too much songs to it and mixing creatively written songs with very generic ones. Still it is worth checking out and it would work well as a background music for work. But if you need to have a great musical experience, play just a few songs from this record or choose some other album.

Originally written for Tony Blackthrasher on Instagram and Facebook