Review:
Have you ever seen the Family Guy episode where the donut revolves around Peter's torso, he cheers every time he sees it and then sighs every time it goes behind his body? That's what I felt like while I listened to the latest Divine Heresy record entitled Bringer Of Plagues.
For those of you who don't know, Divine Heresy is fat Dino Cazares' first major project after being given the boot from Fear Factory. The band is actually a super group of sorts featuring Tim Yeung (ex Vital Remains) on drums and Joe Payne (ex Nile) on bass. For the bands first release, Bleed The Fifth, vocal duties were employed by Tommy "Vext" Cummings but he was fired after an on-stage argument with Dino. Now the band features relatively unknown Travis Neal behind the microphone.
This band has all the makings to be awesome. Dino's signature fast thrash, start/stop, guitars are in full effect and Yeung is able to pull off his best Raymond Herrera impression and keep up with the guitars with his double bass. Doing something that Herrera hardly experimented with was adding blast beats and drum fills throughout. It kept the feel of Fear Factory but added that little extra something to make it interesting and stand apart. In continuing with the Fear Factory cloning the band opted to mix both screams and clean vocals and its here that the band goes south in a hurry. Maybe it's because I am used to and enjoy Burton's vocals on the Fear Factory records that made it that much harder to enjoy these vocals but I have to say every time Travis Neal starts to bellow out his singing voice, I cringed. His screams are whatever. They're higher pitched than Bell's bassier vocals but nothing that will ruin your ear drums, however his cleans sound like they belong on the next Breaking Benjamin record rather than a death metal Fear Factory replica.
Some of the parts on this record are so awesome and actually give me hope for the next Fear Factory record now that Dino is back in the band but there are some parts on this record that make me want to tear my ears off my head. And let's not even talk about track 10, the ballad of the record. I may punch a hole into my computer screen addressing that atrocity. This is a prime example of how the wrong vocalist can near completely ruin a band. If Burton C. Bell was singing on this record and it was called Fear Factory instead of Divine Heresy, I'd near dump in my pants with excitement knowing Fear Factory wrote another solid record. But it's not Fear Factory nor Burton on vocals so no pants pooping on my behalf.
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