Ever since the beginning of their career, excluding a brief honeymoon period during the ‘Ascendancy’ cycle, Trivium have always been sort of an easy target, which they themselves didn’t help by constantly changing musical directions and going through even more drummers. Their collaboration with David Draiman on 2013’s ‘Vengeance Falls’ and with Michael Baskette, of Alter Bridge and Slash fame, on ‘Silence in the Snow’ a couple of years later, resulted in two more mainstream-sounding records, with a bunch of good songs, but many of the ‘extreme’ elements of their sound missing.
It seems the recipe needed some fresh blood: Enter virtuoso drummer Alex Bent and Lamb of God producer Josh Wilbur. After the great top-to-bottom ‘The Sin and the Sentence’, the band finally, for the first time, decided to release an album which sounds like the previous one’s natural successor, and to no surprise, Philip Dick inspired ‘What the Dead Men Say’ is equally great. It is in fact even more compact and concise (9+1 songs, 46 minutes) and bursting at the seems with ideas: From the Gojira laser beam trickery of the amazing title track to the relentless Killswitch Engage riffing in ‘The Defiant’, a pretty sizeable part of modern metal is represented some way or another.
Whether Matt Heafy can pull off live the highly demanding vocals he came up with remains to be seen, during their next tour, if and when that takes place. For the time being, in this weird period, you can catch him on Twitch and YouTube…
