Feed The Rhino – The Silence
With an attempt to add to their respectable back catalogue of metal releases, sluggers in the UK metal scene Feed The Rhino turn in their new album titled The Silence. A dull and lethargic effort that would probably be bettered by actually featuring more silence. Known for their explosive live shows and powerful sound, Feed The Rhino made a name for themselves by delivering a nice blend of aggressive, British sounding metal with a pissed off punk edge. And without personally ever being their biggest fan, past releases like Mr. Red Eye and The Burning Sons were certainly strong enough to catch my ear. These releases earned them many great support slots in their early years, often putting some great fellow British metal bands such as Bury Tomorrow and While She Sleeps in awkward positions on show nights, by putting on such a sweltering support performance, that it often resulted in Feed The Rhino stealing the limelight. In 2018 the Feed The Rhino effect seems to be wearing off, and this new record definitely doesn’t ignite any new interest in the band for me whatsoever.
The opener on the album Timewave Zero sets out the tone of the album somewhat pretty well. A syncopated synth rhythm accompanied by clean guitar chords and some pretty indiscernible spoken words start this album off, and when expecting a hard hitting, abrasive metal album, this is pretty disappointing. And not to say that a synth line with spoken words and clean guitar chords can’t work together, it’s just that this combination used by Feed The Rhino here isn’t anything special, and feels pretty awkward. That being said, after the intro to the track, it does burst into some heavily distorted guitars and hard drums on queue, but this does not mean the track gets any better. The sound and production on the album is soooo overly clean, dull and at times, lifeless. Within 10 minutes of the project I knew I’d had enough really. Combine this sound with some of the edgiest lyrics and vocal delivery I’ve heard since I was 13 years old; “Mirror mirror mirror mirror mirror on my fucking wall, who are you to laugh at, reflections of my past man” followed later in the track by, “Mirror mirror mirror, mirror mirror, fuck you”. I understand that lyrics are of course very subject to opinion, and there are some much better lyrics on the album, but seriously, listen to the vocal delivery on this thing and you’ll understand how it sounds like metal album aimed at Taylor Swift die-hard’s ready to make the transition to their teen angst phase.
Without trying to linger too much on the awful opener, the next few tracks don’t redeem things much either. They also feature that same attempt of a raw sound that fails, and ends up producing such a sickeningly clean atmosphere. There are so many cleanly sang sections within the first few tracks that feel so out of place it’s dizzying. And it’s not that vocalist Lee Tobin is a bad vocalist, it just feels somewhat limited and predictable, and the general riff composition and structures of songs feel pretty cliché and watered down. Around 80% of The Silence feels like this, and there’s nothing that really catches the ear throughout the entire project.
A track worth mentioning for what feels like a nice change would be Losing Ground. The quieter moments in this track are quite sweet, with a pretty nice vocal performance, a decent rhythm section and a great little clean guitar riff. The guitar solo at the end is ok too, but the chorus hits heavy with distortion and isn’t as good as the verses, and the bridge in this song then goes into full on mode with the shouted vocals, and feels very disjointed as well, but at least it brings contrast to the sweeter quiet moments? One of the biggest problems with this track though IS the fact that it is such a nice break, considering it’s the third track on the album, a break like this shouldn’t really be needed so much after 7 minutes…
With the second half of the album in general, there was nothing that caught my ear. Within 10 minutes of the 40-minute album, I really felt as if I’d heard everything there was to offer on this thing. There are a handful of moments where maybe a riff comes in, or a different tone was used on the guitars or bass that would sound nice, such as the intro to the track The Silence or the rhythm section in Yellow and Green, but then would shortly change back in to the same monotone style that plagues the album. Fences is another pretty rough listen, on some level it has a different atmosphere to a lot of the album, but still somehow gives you that feeling of “oh it’s just another one of these ones”. The closer on the album Featherweight, probably stands out as one of the best tracks on the album next to Losing Ground, it has some nice riffs and a good structure, but yet again it’s far from earthshattering.
On the whole, it’s pretty obvious this album wasn’t my kind of thing. Feed The Rhino have gone from sounding like one of the rawest bands in the UK, to being one of the dullest and watered down on this record. The tones and atmospheres are all very predictable, the great moments are few and far between, if there are any, and the mix is so clean it hurts. To me what I heard of their earlier work showed a lot more potential, the ideas were a bit more nuanced, didn’t have as many simple and formulaic structures and textures and definitely stuck out to me more, for the right reasons that is. Hopefully these songs go off live as well as some of their older material does, maybe that can be some level of saving grace. As for this right here though, it might not be the worst album you’ll hear all year, but it’s probably one of them.
Rating: 1.5/5
Highlights: Losing Ground
Find Feed The Rhino on Facebook and Twitter here:
https://www.facebook.com/feedtherhino/
The Silence is out now and available here!
Reviewed by Harrison Deacon
