- Country: USA
- Style: Groove metal
- Label: Nuclear Blast
- Release date: 26 January 2018
Few records of 2018 split a fanbase down the middle quite like this one. Robb Flynn warned everyone in advance that Catharsis wasn’t Machine Head at their heaviest, and he meant it: fifteen songs, well over an hour of music, and a band clearly bored of writing ten-minute thrash epics. What you get instead is groove, hooks and a lot of mood swings.
When it lands, it lands hard. “Volatile” opens with the kind of stomp that made The Blackening crowds lose their minds, and “Beyond the Pale” rides a fat, bouncing riff that sounds built for festival fields. The title track is the real keeper, a big, bruised chorus over a mid-paced chug that sticks after one spin. “Kaleidoscope” is pure muscle and gets straight to the point.
The trouble is everything around those peaks. “Bastards” is a punky singalong that some will love and many will skip, “Behind a Mask” drifts, and the lyrics on a few tracks feel like they were written for a reaction rather than a song. Flynn produced it himself with Zack Ohren at Sharkbite Studios in Oakland, and the mix is punchy and clean, but forty minutes of this would have been a far stronger record. Flawed, frustrating, occasionally brilliant.
Best tracks:
Volatile
Catharsis
Beyond the Pale
Kaleidoscope
Heavy Lies the Crown
Author’s rating: 7.0/10
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