Album Review: Slave to the Game by Emmure

Emmure: repping breakdowns since '03. If there’s one thing you can safely say about Emmure then it’s this: they love a good breakdown. Their fifth album in as many years, ‘Slave To The Game’ is positively packed full of them. Mixing snarling, spoken word vocals with guttural roars, there’s a distinctly nu edge to their particular brand of brutality this time around – perhaps most evident on the crunching ‘MDMA’ – while its down tuned and occasionally off-kilter tendencies ensure that heads are as likely to bop as they are bang.

Full Review >>

Coming only one year after their sloppy Speaker of the Dead from 2011, Slave To The Game finds emotional death metal band Emmure treading only slightly new waters both lyrically and sonically, being both afraid to escape their violent masculine mentality and stubbornly loyal to their bone-churning riffage. The lyrics here may only be a slight step up from their album Felony’s riveting tales of smashing faces with bottles of Blue Moon, but to waltz into an Emmure album craving lyrical brilliance is to expect pencil shavings from an axe. Frankie Palmeri has decisively chosen to cement his band’s stature as an engine for celebrating vengeful machismo as well as subtly praising the Lord (check “Poltergeist” for the awkward mash-up of Palmeri’s shrieks and prayers together).

Full Review >>

The nu-metal phase of the early '00s left a bad taste in most people's mouths. There are a number of reasons most refer to that period and genre ? if it can even really be considered a sub-genre ? disparagingly, but the most well-known is likely the combination of rap and metal. For a few years, acts like Limp Bizkit pretty much blew it for anyone who wanted to play heavy riffs and throw in some rhymes.

Full Review >>