It’s always impressive when bands can accurately evoke emotions in their music. A number of veteran bands can’t conjure the same rage on an entire album that Methodical do on each track of this eponymous release, full of songs specifically crafted to crush skulls.
It’s obvious that Methodical wanted to show how introspective they are by fitting as many musical ideas as possible onto the album. For some genres like classical music or even progressive metal, lengthy tracks are a given and almost expected, but when it comes to more traditional styles of metal too many tracks can be drawn out and sometimes painful. Musically these guys are pretty good—nothing on this album is sloppy or awkward other than the song lengths. After putting on the record, I listened for what felt like an eternity only to look at the track list and realize that I was still on the first song.
Methodical is a mixed bag; it has some killer tracks and some that it could have done without. I suppose that this is inevitable when album is an hour long with 15 tracks. This is definitely a band to watch for in the future, if they focus more on writing strong songs rather than writing a lot of songs they could really go far.
In A Word: Gritty
