Trivium: The Crusade : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Nothing mars a good metal record like so-called harsh vocals, which is a nice way of referring to the booming, incoherent growling style so many metal groups who grew up listening to nasty stuff from Florida or Scandinavia use today. Matt Heafy, lead vocalist of the Orlando, Florida, thrash-metal quartet Trivium, fell into that trap on their first two records -- but for their new politically charged album, The Crusade, he's tossed the bark aside in favor of his actual voice. The change makes all the difference, even if he now sounds so much like his hero James Hetfield it's distracting. The rest of Trivium also sound like they've been listening to Cliff Burton-era Metallica on nonstop shuffle, but somehow they never come off as a cheap knockoff. Trivium's songs are mostly taken straight from the headlines -- though their newspaper must be late, because some of the stories are at least five years old. "Entrance of the Conflagration" is about Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children in 2001, and "Contempt Breeds Contamination" is about the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo by the NYPD. Still, when Heafy and Co. rip into Bush and Co. for their Iraq fuck-up on biting speed-metal tracks like "Ignition" and "Detonation," they seem like one of the few contemporary metal bands that matter.