Shihad Ignite (Warner) CD Review

January 10, 2011

The beginning of Ignite sounds like Shihad are poised to deliver their most powerful album since Churn. โ€˜The Final Year Of The Universeโ€™ is appropriately apocalyptic and doomy, and recaptures some of the groupโ€™s early promise, when they were still churning on the post-industrial hard rock template that Killing Joke had come up with a decade before.

โ€˜Lead Or Followโ€™ is a single, and despite incorporating vocal harmonies and conventional chorus/melody, it has real bite and energy, and manages to escape the blandness that onset the group when they were busy pandering to the American market.

Itโ€™s becoming increasingly hard to accept a premise like โ€˜Iโ€™m A Voidโ€™ in a band of 30-somethings who have settled down with wives and kids, but itโ€™s a cool riff and once again, has a certain apocalyptic energy that vibes off Killing Joke.

It all starts to go horribly wrong with โ€˜In The Futureโ€™, a half-formed idea of a song that remains unresolved; and then โ€˜Sleepeaterโ€™, another single with a kicker riff thatโ€™s otherwise just too predictable, too contained in its restrictive format.

Then the title tune, which turns out to be their attempt at a power ballad, which isnโ€™t bad but means the album loses any impetus it has built up. โ€˜Engageโ€™ is back to the crashing guitar anger, but its humdrum lyrics come on like a seminar from a Mind-Body-Spirit festival.

The last three tracks fail to rescue this fatally derailed record. Replacing apocalyptic lyrics with relationship scenarios shears away the potency of the sonic attack. On โ€˜Nemesis (Dark Star)โ€™ ย Jon Toogood rails โ€œEverybodyโ€™s got it in for meโ€ like a victim, not the ferocious rock God his fans want to picture him as, and it has to be said: all the best riffs are at the beginning of the album

Ignite is like a damp Chinese firework that lets out a brilliant multicolour puff of promise, and then dies in the blackness of the November night sky. While they seem to want to recapture their firepower, Shihad end up sounding like a product of the Hutt Valley โ€“ too power-arena, too Bogan. GARY STEEL

Sound = 3/5

Music = 3/5

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Steel has been penning his pungent prose for 40 years for publications too numerous to mention, most of them consigned to the annals of history. He is Witchdoctor's Editor-In-Chief/Music and Film Editor. He has strong opinions and remains unrepentant. Steel's full bio can be found here

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