The new Critical Defiance it is a clear leap in quality as regards the sounds and the compositional process. In a way everything is improved, and The Search Won’t Fall serves as a breaking point with a phase of their career that we can now confidently label as unripe. In reality the same thing could be said about No Life Formsthe second and beautiful studio album by Chilean thrashers. What has changed then?
First of all, the two tenured guitarists. He remains stable in training Felipe Alvarado, the only veteran of the very first years, guitarist, composer and singer of Critical Defiance. Alongside him the six strings now have new masters and their names correspond to Mauricio Toledo and Nicolas Young. When you implement such a revolution in the structure of the group it is clear that not everything will sound coherent with the recent past.
The change of manufacturer is another cornerstone of the aforementioned revolution. Sebastian Palominos, who, I scroll through his CV, appears to have worked with Supreme Gore Delicatessen (!!!), did an excellent and at the same time innovative job. Critical Defiance gave up their stripped-down sound worthy of the second half of the Eighties in favor of a more full-bodied, but not therefore plasticized, form.
Some distinctive features emerge from the sound sector that I cannot ignore at all. On the one hand Nicolas Young is certainly a great hard rock fan: Absolute is heavily indebted to the 1980s and the attack of Long Distance as well, at least until it veers towards the boundaries of black metal, with a pace that becomes more extreme as it approaches the conclusion. On the other, precisely, the snapshot (forty-four seconds flat) All the Powers and the accompanying blast beats are the certification that Critical Defiance don’t simply play thrash Kreator (Terrible Certainty and no further) amplified by a very clear technical vein – given to it at most by the skills of bassist Ignacio Arevalo – but they enriched it with extreme metal while remaining within the limits tolerated by us.
The highlight is the title track. Attack with arpeggio and harmonizations Metallicaor rather to …and Justice For All, which opens to a largely European melody and a riff in the chorus that I would keep as my cell phone ringtone, if only such a strum could be clearly distinguished on certain devices. The rest of the album is beautifully crafted with the exception of a few too many instrumentals, above all Bulldogin which, you would never have said it, dogs can be heard barking a moment before the guitar solo. Why did you do it? What kind of problem was plaguing you that day? Did they poison you in the park with meatballs full of nails and rat poison?
Basically I preferred them earlier, a moment earlier. Less played on contrasts, less rockers on one side and extremes on the other, so much so that we suffer from this combination almost everywhere nowadays. And straighter, eighty-style, as we enjoy them today in the suite Critical Defiance, which finishes the job with dignity as soon as it decides to leave in sixth gear. And more generally I preferred them as they had played in No Life Formswith that excellent thrash metal that I still remember well today: The Last Crusaders And Dying Breath they were two incredible songs.
Good return for Critical Defiance, with two capable new guitarists in the lineup and a melodic and sonic vein that I certainly appreciated. But I don’t prefer it to the one I just passed. This is good, but with some changes it could be even better. By the way: weren’t you referring to those asthmatic farting French bulldogs? (Marco Belardi)
