A Chorus of Obliteration

A Chorus of Obliteration is the album that could. There’s a lot going for it that positively screeches “classic” – namely, how it starts off with the kind of bang most bands wish they could start their albums off with. Having started as a pop punk band, The Showdown integrate this sound well into a more whiskey-tinged melodic metalcore framework. Songs like “Hell Can’t Stop Us Now” and “Epic: A Chorus of Obliteration” are so unabashedly poppy – particularly in the case of the latter’s ridiculously bouncy composition – that even a decade and a half later, their melodies still haven’t left my head. You get songs like “From the Mouth of Gath Comes Terror” and “Your Name is Defeat” where they show off their more aggressive leanings. More forceful riffing and harsher vocals creating heavier joints offsets the Simple Plan meets Shadows Fall affectations I mentioned earlier. There’s a lot going for this album that could easily easily EASILY put it up there with the scene’s greats.

I mentioned “Your Name is Defeat” above, and really, even if it feels a bit unfinished, its short length ends up working in its favor. A quick burst of angry riffing, just to get the frustration of creating something out there before getting back to business with the upbeat and triumphant “Your Name is Victory” and the sobering balladry of “Laid to Rest”. There’s no reason to pretend the “Your Name is” songs are all that great, but they do summarize the album rather well. The thing with this album is that the album works at its best when it’s focused on a sound – like “Hell Can’t Stop Us Now” being so ridiculously upbeat that it just feels fucking good, or “From the Mouth of Gath Comes Terror” burning your face off with some molten riffing, or “Laid to Rest” with its soulfulness (one of few times where the ballad is a highlight and a great song in its own right). Those three songs, alongside “A Monument Encased in Ash” and “Epic: A Chorus of Obliteration”, are exactly what make this album pop with bopping beats, grooves smoother than a freshly sanded table and riffs that set everything ablaze.

So, what happened? Honestly, a lot of it comes down to the middle third of the album. I mean, “A Proclamation of Evil’s Fate” starts off well with a peppy beat and a neat little lick before kicking into more aggro grooving... and then it just finds itself in this other groove that technically lasts about a couple and a half minutes, but given how short and repetitive it is, it feels like it lasts like a million years! “Dagon Undone (The Reckoning)” has a similar problem, but it’s more to do with how it kind of zips between some hard and fast riffing, a harder groove, some In Flames harmonics and... yeah, basically, this song goes nowhere and comes across quite incomplete. “Iscariot” has a pretty sweet intro and chorus lick, but that’s about it. It’s at about that point that it definitely feels like a first album in that it certainly shows off what they’re capable of, but it lacks the necessary tightness to make it totally work.

Regardless of songs, however, one problem is highly persistent; the harsh vocals are not particularly good. The growls work with the more groove-like death metal-y tracks like “Your Name is Defeat” than they do for tracks that aren’t quite like that like “A Monument Encased in Ash” – and in cases like the latter, it’s really unfitting as it doesn’t really add to any kind of melody or anything. It just is. Even for the former, things that make the greats stand out like presence and brutality aren’t really there. They’re at least suitable – and that’s the good news. The screaming, though? Holy fuck, these are grating! Well, there’s a lot put into them. Yeah, that’s about it, since its acidity does not work at all with anything on this record, and it’s pretty far forward into the mix, really pronouncing its poor implementation – especially during the poppier cuts. Noise rock bands would think it’s too much.

That’s why A Chorus of Obliteration doesn’t quite reach the top. It comes close thanks to its strengths, but its weaknesses plop this fantastic album down to the status of being good. It’s a matter of tightening the songs up to be consistently tops, since the better half of the album showcases some real fucking chops, and the worse half really only has the problem of not having the ideas and techniques unified in any compelling way. That, and the screams are pretty bad. If nothing else, writing a better ballad than pretty much every power metal band not named Blind Guardian definitely counts for something.