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Reviews
A Life Once Lost: Hunter
17/02/06 || Global Domination
This review was written by ex-staffer/cocksmoker City Of Dis.
The other day I was surfing the web, minding my own business, thinking about nothing the way it’s fun to do on Sunday afternoons when the sun’s making patterns on your computer tower and you have a mug of coffee beside you snaking steam-trails into the air. Anyway, I was doing the abovementioned, and I checked Metal-Archives to see what new reviews were in.
This fellow whose reviews I read rated the new A Life Once Lost CD a 77, and I had some cash burning a hole in mine pocket, so I headed over to the main site and checked out the “Vulture” video.
Before I knew it, I was nodding along to a decently penned and executed tech-metal song, with hints of Watchtower shining through the obvious Meshuggah tendencies and a damn catchy chorus that made my head move like it was attached to a piledriver. The decent drumming, cool solo and guest appearance from Randy Blythe of Lamb of God have me sold before I can really reconsider… and I’ll be damned if, an hour later, I’m leaving FYE (I feel dirty going in there) with Hunter in a bag.
“Will I regret this purchase?” I thought out loud as I walked home, wanting to hear the record on my stereo, since it seems like that sort of barebones metal as opposed to intricate headphone-music filled with loads of cool twaddle.
I tear the door open, pop the CD in… and within six seconds I’m feeling disappointed. The opener, “Rehashed,” while sporting an at least mediocre chorus riff, is really nothing compared to “Vulture,” the song I was hooked by. The riffs are way more predictable and it basically sounds exactly like any random “Chaosphere” song with a new vocalist and a worse drummer. Within two minutes, I’m bored as fuck and skip to the next song… that is… wait for it… the same noodling Meshuggah-lifted claptrap as the last song. If Meshuggah is the current tech-metal campus stud, the one who gets all the women in spite of being what seems like a total recluse, A Life Once Lost seems to be the tech-metal campus frat boy, only managing to get laid with a combination of clear-dye rohypnol, endless patience, and a large supply of cheap potato vodka.
The album goes on and on and on and on for what seems like three hours due to a total dearth of songwriting ideas and only picks up around the pretty good title track and the respectable “Grotesque”, which manages to sound at least halfway aggressive and sports the only riff on the album which the band can say they didn’t steal from several other bands.
If you really want to listen to this album, then just download “Vulture,” “Hunter,” and “Grotesque” and repeat in random order until you have twelve songs, then burn the whole thing onto a CD. The result will be much more enjoyable than actually listening to the full album, especially given the hilariously bad songs that are a result of them trying to abandon the formula that the whole damned thing is written from. This would actually be a good thing… if they had any good ideas (“Salai” is a great example of a really fucking stupid idea: “HEY! Let’s make a throwaway industrialized intro that’s longer than an actual song and throw a random-ass riff onto it!”).
4 pairs of beaten-up penny loafers out of 10. I’m going to go listen to Coroner now and regain faith in technical metal instead of wasting my time with this middling assbutter.
- Information
- Released: 2005
- Label: Ferret Records
- Website: www.alifeoncelost.com
- Band
- Bob Carpenter: Guitar
- Bob Meadows: Vocals
- Justin Graves: Drums
- Doug Sabolick: Guitar
- Nick Frasca: Bass
- Tracklist
- 01. Rehashed
- 02. Needleman
- 03. Vulture
- 04. Pain & Panic
- 05. Hunter
- 06. Grotesque
- 07. Salai
- 08. A Rush & Siege
- 09. I Give In
- 10. Ghosting
- 11. With Pitiless Blows