Heavy Metal Nation is a place for fans of heavy, interesting music to come and read, write, and comment on articles about heavy music. This is my first of hopefully many album reviews by me.

On the heels of great success with the previous album, Ascendancy, Trivium went off with a bang with their newest piece, The Crusade. Totalling 13 songs all up, 2 of which were iTunes exclusive, Trivium have made a new path for themselves. No longer were the screaming vocals of Matt heard or the hardcore sound was present, but an all new Thrash version of Trivium emerged.

Instead of hearing Matt scream his lungs out with rage and fury you can now hear Matt actually sing clean vocals and from my stance it's not a bad change. The first few tracks; "Ignition" and "Detonation" kick off the start to the album with a nice fast and thrashy style that any old-school Metallica fan could appreciate. Matt's vocals have improved in the aspect that didn't need to scream to produce a good song.

Another interesting aspect about The Crusade is that a number of the songs on the album are about true stories of murder. "Entrance Of The Conflagration" details the story of how Andrew Yates murdered his five children, "Unrepentant" is about Nazir Ahmad and the murdering of his three daughters and stepdaughter. "Contempt Breeds Contamination" details the the death of Amadou Diallo, and "And Sadness Will Sear" tells the story of the murder of Matthew Shephard, killed because of his sexual orientation.

One of the tracks on The Crusade "This World Can't Tear Us Apart" changes in direction from the other tracks where it's more of a slower paced song compared to the others. The final song, "The Crusade", is an 8 minute instrumental piece which is a combination of 80's Metallica meets Iron Maiden, where it's thrashy yet it's progressive. For fans of the previous albums and who love metalcore it may take a while to get used to this album
but if your a fan of the styles of Metallica, Pantera, Iron Maiden then you're no doubt going to love this album.

Completely different from the previous albums but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Posted 20th February 2007 by Simon420
Updated Monday, 4 July, 2011 0:43 AM