ALBUM REVIEW: Reflections – From Ashes To New
FROM ASHES TO NEW is the band you think of when the words “Sirius XM Octane” are spoken. In a way, they are perfectly emblematic of how much commercial hard rock and metal has stagnated since the day of LINKIN PARK – if you listen to the most popular new bands in metal either on the radio or on Spotify playlists, the sound becomes incredibly predictable. Verses that are screamed or rapped, a huge stadium-ready chorus, a one-note metalcore breakdown for the bridge, and little to nothing in terms of original riffs. This is the formula that FROM ASHES TO NEW follow to a T on their fifth studio album, Reflections, with a title that is suitably generic for the music contained within it.
We’re not going to act like this album is offensively bad, but it has so little substance or identity that it’s hard to say anything positive about it. Every track on here just gives me flashbacks to another song you’d heard in the background while driving and scanning through rock stations. The choruses are catchy enough, lead singer Danny Case’s vocals are solid, and they’re really the only memorable elements of the album. Occasionally a riff surfaces through the compressed production and guitar-swallowing, Zakk Cervini snare plugin, but for the most part there is instrumentally nothing to write home about.
What really brings this album down outside of these bog standard elements is the rapping from Matt Brandyberry. The reason that LINKIN PARK managed to be one of the hallmark bands of the nu-metal movement was that Mike Shinoda’s rapping was a great complement to Chester Bennington’s inimitable vocals. While you could certainly say that lyrically it could be melodramatic and not all that “deep”, there was both an earnestness to the delivery and enough power in the rest of the music to make up for any lyrical shortcoming that may have appeared. Any instance of rapping here is filled with eye-rolling bars like, “Your sticks and stones may break my bones / But your words make me wish I was dead” on Die For You (one of the most used titles for a rock song ever, don’t get us started on the fact that this is probably the millionth metalcore influenced album to have a song called Parasite) or “There’s nothing louder than the silence / The evil hides until it tells me, ‘Bring the violence’” on (Not) Psycho, which, to be fair, was doomed to be bad from its name alone. It doesn’t help that the rapping is often drenched in digital effects, pitched-down, or supplemented with vocal samples that do nothing good for the already shallow songwriting.
Occasionally, one of the sticky choruses manages to be memorable, like on Darkside or Upside Down, but it’s nothing you couldn’t hear done better by other alternative metal acts. There’s nothing truly offensive about Reflections, but there’s even less to praise. It’s another factory-produced hard rock record that will inevitably stream well and have zero cultural impact. There is nothing criminal about it, but we can do so much better.
Rating: 4/10
Reflections is out now via Better Noise Music.
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