Believer - Gabriel

Difficult to rate this album. It has both great and bad moments.

Masterly. Finally i have already got the disc, It's a sickly mix of metal played with great technique (by the way, i love this drum and this bass), between modern metal and old school thrash metal with electronic touchs, very tasteful in the keyboards, the collection of riffs is tremendous and imaginative, yes, metal very fresh to my ears (also i like very much the singer, a very special voice to my ears). The theme of the album seems to be related with the human and our world, and the science, that fits very well with the music. Even there is also place to experiment in the paranoia "Nonsense Mediated Decay", or in the hidden songs of this album, with a solid hour of duration (good work). Also to say the album's sound is "cojonudo" (brilliant) =) and the cover art is one of the best i have seen. And other thing, the album sometimes remember me to the song "Cars", or maybe the album "Obsolete"? (haha, well, better don't ask me why =)).

I remember this album being the point where I first found out about this band. I recall some people disliking it, so I didn't listen or think about it and went for the first three albums instead. Now, having just listened to the original classics, I think this doesn't hold up to them. The experimentation is heavily toned down here and they went more back to their roots. Still, the songs are way more varied than most in thrash metal albums: the thrashiest parts similar to Sanity Obscura are obviously the best ones, others are kinda hit and miss, at times the slower parts feel just clumsy and uninteresting. I think the production isn't as good as it could be, the muddy guitar tone especially reminded me of this Russian band "Shah", which had one of the weirdest distortion effects I have ever heard.