The Way of the Cyst

Now that the pesky first review is over, I can work on things I actually want to talk about. So here's one about an album I was recently exposed to while hanging out with some friends. We were hanging out, playing pool in the basement, and this came on my buddy's computer and I thought it sounded a lot like Motograter. Let's get one thing straight: I love Motograter. I saw them live at OzzFest back in 2003 and really liked the music, and the vocals were probably the best part. The writing for the songs also came as a surprise from most metal acts, and the songs ranged from brutal fight songs, introspective letters, to pointing out all thats wrong with the world--and it pulled them all off wonderfully. Come to find that Ivan "Ghost" Moody is the singer of both bands. It ended up being a band I had heard of more times than I could imagine but never actually heard.

The Way of the Fist by Five Finger Death Punch (2007) at first listen is a great album. Ivan Moody is a great vocalist, hitting all the right notes from his deep growl to his haunting melodies. The guitar work by Darrell Roberts added an almost classic metal feel with squealing solos. Some of the best songs on the album are the bonus tracks from the 2008 re-release like Never Enough, Stranger Than Fiction, and Hate Me. The best song on the original release of album by far was their single The Bleeding with one of the most intense music videos I've ever seen from a metal band.

It's when you listen to the album from start to finish you start to notice something. The themes in the songs are used and reused ad naseum with very few exceptions. The album opens with Ashes with the anti-Midas image of "Everything I touch turns to ashes." Nice opener for the album even if the song for some reason appears a little lackluster due to the brutal verses followed by a kind of lacking in brutality and melodie chorus. The album title track, The Way of the Fist is a fight song that reminds me of some really good UFC fights, especially since the video for the song is a typical metal video with montages of cage fights mixed with the band performing in a cage of their own.

Salvation is where the repeating theme starts. The song is more or less about how he is looked down on for not believing in the their God or whatever--a message I can appreciate at its base by being a lapsed Catholic myself. The songwriting is dead on, with a really good chorus "I won't bow to something that I've never seen/I can't believe in something that doesn't believe in me/I'm not blood of your blood, I'm no son of your god/I've no faith in your fate/Still I find salvation." The melody melding into painful screaming counters the heavy-handed pre-chorus that screams how the followers of said belief are just "puppets on strings," which is technically not how you make friends. Other songs that echo this I'm-not-good-enough/ You're-just-a-follower/Why-doesn't-daddy-love-me motif are...almost all of them! Seriously, A Place to Die, The Devil's Own, Death Before Dishonor, Meet the Monster, Never Enough, and Hate Me. I mean, these are all great songs with good writing and good vocals and guitar in each of them, but we don't need an entire metal album about the same damn thing. The only other songs are the already mentioned amazing The Bleeding, White Knuckles which could be misheard as a fight song but really has some amazing writing behind it, and Can't Heal You which could almost fit in the other theme.

Each of the songs on the album is worth a listen and they're all very well done, but to listen to the whole album in one sitting you start to hear the repeating and unoriginal ideals the music is throwing at you. The songs are just too frequent and in too close of proximity to another on the album. The re-release also included an acoustic version of The Bleeding if you're into that kind of thing. I like it a lot, as do some of my friends, but there are arguments that "metal bands shouldn't do that." I think those arguments are full of crap, because I like when people do things differently than they're used to or if they make something their own. Five Finger Death Punch does exactly that in their album, if only they did a little bit more variety in their themes.

-Evan "Dez" O'Connor