Band:	J.C. Jess
Album:	Battlefront
Style:	Heavy metal, Power metal
Release date:	2011
A review by:	wormdrink414

01. Intro
02. Saviour
03. Walk With Us
04. Decline
05. Deads Are All Great
06. Remember
07. Prepare, Aim, Fire
08. Soldier
09. Frontline
10. Irreversible Damages
11. Crappy Day
12. Requiem
13. Backfire
14. The First Time I Was Born

Neutrinos might be able to travel faster than light. "Deads Are All Great" is officially the name of a song now. Everything you think you know about anything is probably wrong. 2012. Illuminati. Jews. Colonel Sanders. 9/11. Dick Cheney. May God have mercy on all of us.

Listened to the first three minutes of this album and immediately freeballed up a short review for it. Looked something like this:

'This, uh, *deep nostril inhale* no. 3 out of 10, end of story.'

But then I started doubting myself and listened to it a bit more. Just to be safe. Proceeded to follow that by another listen, and then by even more. Then some more. And then, funny thing is, around play-through number five[url= I still fucking didn't like it. Each time I hit play for it, I can't understand what it is that I was hoping to get out of it, and yet I keep coming back. It's definitely not very fun or unique or badass or enchanting, and it's not an album that's so bad it's funny. It's just a poorly-produced, under-riffed, heavy metal-seeped heap of meh. One that has something about it that I keep wanting to hear. It's kind of like a Ron Howard movie in that way. It'll mostly be awful or generic and/or sadistically dull, but when one's on, I somehow always end up watching it.

Pretty sure that not much of the shittiness on this is the product of incompetence, though. The production equipment J.C. used was almost certainly utter orangutans-fucking-giraffes nonsense. Almost nothing about Battlefront came out sounding right. Well over half the time--that'd be over half an hour--the production stifles the guitar work. And that's a big fucking problem. One will clearly make out the occasional clean pinch harmonics, the beats, and the singing, but will have to pay pretty close attention most of the time to hear what exactly the rhythm guitar parts are attempting to do. And there's no hope of ever ripping shit up to a riff when you're constantly forced to do the Tyrone Biggums ear-cup by your stereo, attempting to catch melodies or comprehend where tunes are going.

J.C. Jess' talent does occasionally poke through, though. Some of the soloing is stellar, some of the choruses are catchy, the vox-work is solid throughout, and occasionally a riff will work well (the intro to "Decline", for example). It's just, by the end, what they do adeptly isn't enough to make up for the shit production and the load of songs that seem both over-planned and half-heartedly executed. This is a bad, boring album. Period. The albums that I initially hate but end up enjoying are typically those that fall outside styles I'm comfortable with and/or the ones that are straight awful (i.e. Endless Main's album), and this is neither of those things. It's some frustrating exception to the rule. One that's really, really, uh? frustrating.