Customer Reviews

Isolation

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Fear My Thoughts is an amazing band that has been making great strides to establish itself as a real contender within the Melodic Death Metal scene. With instant classics already under their belt, "Hell Sweet Hell" and "Vulcanus", most would assume that Fear My Thoughts would continue to build upon the styles represented in these albums. Well, this may have happened had the band not replaced vocalist Mathias Benedikt von Ockl with Martin Fischer.

Upon replacing the lead/only vocalist, many bands go through major identity changes. This is what happened to Fear My Thoughts. Rather than continuing to push the band forward within the Melodeath subgenre, Martin seems to stray away completely from any past releases that the band has done. Sounding more like an "Alternative" album mixed with "Sludge" influences, rather than a Melodic Death Metal one, "Isolation" is full of mainly cleanly sung vocals and almost completely lacks anything that can even bare a small resemblance to Melodic Death Metal in the least. Instead of the typical death growls the listeners are used to hearing from Fear My Thoughts, we are now greeted by a raspy style of cleanly sung lyrics.

Songs such as "The Hunted", "Through the Eyes of a God", and "Death Chamber" utilize death growls associated with prior releases, however the amount is very limited. In these tracks, death growls are still overwhelmed by the clean vocals. Other tracks on the album usually contain no death growls at all, and instead consist of, in my opinion, poorly sung vocals. Martin Fischer's voice seems out of place on the album, especially when accompanied by the heavy riffs that dominate the background music.

The singing voice of Martin can be dreadful to the ears on many tracks and usually sounds out of sync or even out of key. Bands such as Deadlock, Soilwork, Sonic Syndicate, and Scar Symmetry are all Melodic Death Metal bands that utilize cleanly sung lyrics, however, they do so in a more limited, and better fashion than what "Isolation" does.

The band announced that this would be their final album together, a decision that has its pros and cons. It is unfortunate to lose a band as good as Fear My Thoughts, however, if they were going to continue to release music such as what is represented on "Isolation" than perhaps the move was for the better. It's disappointing to see such a drastic change occur to one of my all time favorite bands, especially since their most recent album "Vulcanus" was such a stepping stone for the band. "Vulcanus" provided raw, and heavy melodic death metal at its finest, but "Isolation" simply does not deliver the traditional Fear My Thoughts sound that fans have come to expect from the group.

It's sad to see the band leave the music scene on such a sour note, when considering their past work, but I still love Fear My Thoughts. If you're looking for a great Melodic Death Metal album I would recommend getting any of their other releases, such as "Hell Sweet Hell", "Vulcanus", "The Great Collapse", or "Smell Sweet Smell", you may want to avoid "Isolation" unless you enjoy sludge influenced metal.

Over the past two releases, Fear My Thoughts had become one of my favorite bands. 5 years after the release of Hell Sweet Hell, it still gets fairly regular play in my stereo and Vulcanus established the band as not afraid to take some creative risks, that turned out very much to the band's benefit. With the departure of vocalist Mathias Ockl, I was biting my nails with anticipation of how FMT's next disc would turn out. Ockl had the ability to display a large range of diversity and was one of my personal favorite vocalists in the scene. Needless to say, Martin Fischer had some massive shoes to fill.

While FMT has never been afraid to experiment with their sound (just listen to their discography as a whole), Isolation creeps so far out of the band's range that it gives a new meaning to the title. Isolation is something that many FMT fans will be feeling if they were expecting something more along the lines of the band's previous efforts. Sure, "The Hunted" and "Pitch Black" feel more like the FMT I was expecting but new vocalist Martin Fischer has single-handedly destroyed this band for me. I'm not sure what the band was thinking but upon hearing "The Blind Walk Over the Edge", I felt as if I was listening to some awful Avenged Sevenfold knock-off. Feeling a little sick to my stomach, "The Hunted" gave me a momentary grin until the atrocious vocals kicked in. The rest of the disc follows suit, feeling more hard-rock than metal, though "Death Chamber" has some Meshuggah-esque riffing going for it.

I do give the band credit for continually adapting and changing their sound, but it's now out of my listening range. If you had no previous knowledge of the band, you may enjoy it, but this is a huge disappointment if you have enjoyed the band's previous output.

Awesome CD from front to back. FMTs new singer has brought a whole new dimension to the band, and for the better. A mix of "Swedish death metal," Faith No More, Corrosion of Conformity and Metallica. One of the best metal CDs of the year.

I'll start by saying that, musically, this album is pretty sound. It's produced well, the song writing is pretty tight and the new vocalist definitely brings something a little different to the table with his "hauntingly pained" type vocals. That said, what isn't good about this record is that it isn't, in my opinion, Fear My Thoughts. Now, bands can do whatever they want to musically. It's a long hard road to get to a 4th label release, so I have a lot of respect for FMT. However, when I got this CD I was really looking forward to the next brutal step these guys were taking. Hell Sweet Hell is still one of the best metal records to be released in this genre (from the U.S. anyway), and while Vulcanus was a little bit less "intimidating" it still held it's own. Isolation is NOT the same band. The songwriting style is vastly different. The produced sound is nothing like the previous records which held some semblance of consistency with each other. And most importantly, the vocalist is lightyears away from being any type of Death Metal vocalist. He's a mediocre sludge rock singer at best, which isn't fitting for a band that is capable of gigantic metal feats.

If this CD was under a new name and new banner, even with the "associations" with Fear My Thoughts, I would've given it a 4 star rating, because it is a good CD and it is very powerful at times. But it ain't a shredder by any definition of the word. It's not what I wanted to hear when I saw the title Fear My Thoughts, which was mind blowing Melodic Death Metal. I probably won't buy anything else from these guys unless someone tells me "dude, they changed their tune."