by Brian Krasman (Meat Mead Metal)
If you have those cargo shorts wrinkled in your closet and you just can’t wait to get more ’90s-influenced groove metal in your ears, then please leave this site right now. Ah, I kid, and I’m sorry I have to drag Oakland’s Machine Head through the dirt like that, but it’s not inaccurate of their audience, is it? Actually, much like how the Deftones get incorrectly stuck into the nu-metal designation, I feel like this band gets written off by some people for rising to prominence during the reprehensible ’90s Ozzfest era, though they did make some really bad records toward the end of that decade. But they’ve more than made up for that on their last two albums “Through the Ashes of Empires” and “The Blackening.”
So now the band fires back with their seventh studio album “Unto the Locust,” an ambitious, somewhat experimental (not in a bad way) disc that probably will thrill their core and may even turn other heads who swore off this band a decade ago. Frontman/guitarist Robb Flynn still has that affinity for, well, machine-like, sometimes monotone yelling, which does re-surface on this record during songs such as “Be Still and Know” and “Darkness Within,” but he’s also stretching his range more than before, crooning capably on “Locust” and “Pearls Before the Swine,” one of the not-so-great songs on this album. Most surprising is the way the whole album begins, as the band participates in an a capella vocal harmony that sometimes veers toward the Beach Boys on the first section of three-part opener “I Am Hell (Sonata in C#).” I thought the label sent me the wrong file when I heard this, but luckily I stuck around to find out on my own.
The one area where stretching out goes awry is on closer “Who We Are,” that begins with a child chorus that sounds like they employed one too many out-there ideas, and the lyrics to the song are just rife with cliché. Otherwise, this is a pretty decent Machine Head record (with putridly ugly album artwork) that should enlighten their live audiences. I never was a very big fan of this band, though I certainly always gave their records a proper chance before forming my opinion, and “Unto the Locust” isn’t exactly going to ramp up my enthusiasm for them. But that’s just me, as it simply isn’t my thing, but perhaps it’s yours. If so, give it a shot.
