Record Label: Invogue Records
Release Date: September 3rd, 2013
Reviewed By: Alex Maimone
Shreddy Krueger has never been a band I have gone out of my way to listen to. I love their label “Invogue Records” but this band has never stood out to be very spectacular in my eyes. Their new album “The Grieving” was released yesterday, actually.
At first listen, I was like “whoa this is actually really good!” As I continued, I soon came to realize how insanely similar each of the songs sounded to each other. I love breakdowns as much as the next guy, but this band milks it ridiculously. Almost every single song starts out with loads of chugs and then progresses into a chorus with some clean vocals, which then leads back to another breakdown. The repetitiveness of the album is fairly noticeable by just the normal listener.
The clean vocals in the album are pretty great, to be honest. Dude definitely has some sweet pipes. The instrumentals just over-power his voice to the point where he sounds like a whisper, at times. Production played a huge key in this album. Joey Sturgis, mastered the album but did not produce it, which I feel caused some problems. I never see faults in Sturgis’ work; he’s a fantastic producer for this scene.
The song that really stood out greatly, written and produced, was “Empress”. The song takes a different start with a Pop-Punk feel to the instrumentals and some calming but strong cleans. As I mentioned before, this man can sing. If he was maybe in a different genre, he’d really stand out. The screams and rough sounding instruments just take his voice away and makes the album ten times less enjoyable.
Lyrically, “The Grieving” is pretty well written. Haven’t really found any mishaps in the lyrics and that’s great. I always love when a band can actually write substantial and meaningful lyrics to their music.
It’s definitely not the worst album of the year but it’s nowhere close to being in the Top 10. It’s extremely generic and lacks complete diversity. Honestly without the clean vocals, I feel like they wouldn’t have gotten signed to Invogue.
I will not rule them out fully, they still have other releases to catch my interest, but I will not be listening to “The Grieving” any time soon.
OVERALL RATING: 5.5/10
Shreddy Krueger is:
Jordan Chase – vocals
David Ecker – guitar
Tristan Rattink – bass guitar
Ryan Loerke – drums
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