Year Of Metal #056: Trivium - In Waves
Without analysing the numbers, I get the sense Trivium are one of the bigger bands, commercially speaking, I’ve covered so far in this project, and it’s not hard to see why. In Waves is massive, accessible, and refined. I see that they get tagged with the “metalcore” label - this isn’t what I thought metalcore was, I must say, but the inference I get from listening and a little bit of reading is that the polish on this product is enough to turn off some of metal’s more dogmatic fans.
When the approach works, though - when the slickness actually highlights the songcraft - there are some fantastic moments here. It sort of peaks early, opening with 90 second instrumental “Capsizing The Sea”. This is built around a tense, stretched piano riff and a drum line-style snare pattern. It’s clearly building to something as the jagged guitars move in, but I wasn’t expecting anything so dramatic as the sheer drop into “In Waves”. The restrained instrumental gives way to pulverising downtuned chords and death screams from Corey Beaulieu. They then blossom into a chorus that’s essentially pop-metal, but it’s so catchy and bright that you’d have been mad to produce it any other way.
I had a little dig at Cynic for having a second singer just to handle the growling, but I feel like Trivium blend the styles a lot more elegantly. “Inception Of the End” milks the nice ‘n’ nasty dichotomy to great effect. Frontman Matt Heafy is searching and wounded, Beaulieu snarling and aggressive. It’s mainly call and response, but every now and then the two fall into step with one another. There’s a Jungian bent to the technique, perhaps, the light side and the shadow self and all that, but for practical purposes it adds a hard edge to the poppy stuff and a level of approachability to the heavier crunch.
A couple of times Trivium go for full-on rock radio friendliness, and the results are a little mixed. Second single “Built To Fall” feels ready for the big time. The riff is extra chunky, the chorus is one of rising above and triumphing over a malevolent force, and, it being 2011, the vocals even turn a little Chad Kroeger. Like a lot of the record, the music’s a bit out of time; here, especially, I reckon I’d plump for 2001 or so if I didn’t know. In the case of “Built To Fall”, though, that speaks to a timelessness; I could see rock club patrons screaming this in each other’s face on any given Saturday since forever.
The super sincere choruses of “Caustic Are The Ties That Bind”, on the other hand, doesn’t work nearly as well for me. The cleanest ranges of Heafy’s voice are sweeping and dramatic - he’s got a bit of Serj Tankian to him, actually - but this rather more traditional power balladeering isn’t his best style, and the throwback twin guitar solo doesn’t help much, either. (Far better guitar-wise is “Black”, which pelts and splutters around in the verses, finally working up to a frantic whine of a solo.)
The scale, then, is maybe a blessing and a curse for In Waves. There are times when they extend their reach a little too far, either in terms of hit potential or creativity. For the most part, though, shooting for the moon does work. I sense an aspiration to aspire to the more casual fan, and while that’ll irk the purists, that’s seldom a bad thing.
