Surface of Pain

You know, if you just took these individual songs and looked at them separately you'd probably find them to be good, but not great, a low 60 or so. However, I'm giving this a substantially lower score because, sweet Jesus, the tracks on this album are poorly arranged and by the end of this thing you'll just want to throw the CD out the window. It's solid, occasionally pretty good music, but with a certain sickly sweet taste that creates headaches and resembles nothing so much as gorging on cheap candy.

The front half of this album is pretty solid, introducing you to the band's grunge-influenced power metal, "Judas Kiss" being a primer on this album's overly mechanical production (think digitized vocals), oddly tribal rhythm section, and (accented) standard hair vocal. The song is comprised of strange white metal lyrics that seem to obliquely reference stigmata, or perhaps menstruation. Eesh. The next song, "Say Your Prayer" offers no such ambiguity by hitting you over the head. Kids, this is a religious band.

But hear ye, hear ye, they also have CONCERNS about IMPORTANT THINGS. The pounding "State of Grace" (complete with samples!) and "America" do a lot to give the impression that Masquerade is not happy with the way things are, but give the further and far more impactful impression that well, Rage Against the Machine they ain’t. Protest songs tend to be more effective when the band appears to have some idea what they're nattering about.

However, "America" is a pretty good 'epic' with a nice crunchy riff and some good melodies throughout. It should be mentioned that Masquerade do come up with a few doozies from time to time, but lines like "In America, this hysterica, in America" tend to bury any good faith this buys under a pile of crap.

I do have a soft spot in my heart (or head) for the bouncy, leonine "Electric Eye"-style "Suffering", one part strafing speed metal, one part big anthemic (and totally balless) chorus, a song so inherently catchy that I think I've listened to it at least thirty times (number of times I managed to slog through the whole album: two). I swear the melody on the third verse is directly lifted from another song, but I'll be damned if I can recall it.

The rest of the songs are bland, but inoffensive (ignore the horribly drawn out "God of Man"), save for "Mercy Me" which is a powerful rocker that cherry picks from a good number of sources and oddly, forecasts the style of the more epic compositions on Metallica's Reload record with it's melody and (somewhat) a certain subtle similarity in the guitar tone.

Still, very much a waste of time and real struggle to get through.

Stand-Outs: “Suffering”, “Mercy Me”, “America”