Mnemic
SONS OF THE SYSTEM
Nuclear Blast Records

I’m not a Meshuggah fan, but I just have to laugh thinking of past comparisons this band once got to the kinds of headache metal.  Listening to SONS OF THE SYSTEM, I hear very little that reminds of Meshuggah.  By contrast, I hear a lot of comparative attempt to capture the shared vocal/scream combination Burton Bell does with Fear Factory over top of guitars that have the same tuning as Meshuggah, but lack any and all of the punch.  SONS OF THE SYSTEM can be defined in one simple, unflattering word – boring.

It’s unclear why bands can’t grasp this, but one of the core thoughts a band should have is that they should not write songs for radio play.  Radio has to come organically for the band to have long term success.  There’s a reason that bands like Metallica, Megadeth, Black Sabbath and even newer stuff like Disturbed and Korn found success at radio.  It’s because it was organic.  Looking at any of these bands, it was when they started aiming at returned success at radio that their popularity and credibility went down.  For Mnemic, a band that most people in the US aren’t aware of, SONS OF THE SYSTEM will not lead many their way.  So much of this album is either bland radio fodder or just noise that goes nowhere interesting at all.  Listening to “Diesel Uterus” as a prime example, you can just hear some radio blah at the beginning before it disintegrates  into frivolous noise that is about as interesting as watching snow melt.  The harmonized choruses on songs like “Mnightmare” are very blah as well.  Further killing SONS OF THE SYSTEM is the complete and total “clean” sound of the production.  Simply, it ruins it for me.  So many parts on each and every song seem to be cleansed by digital tweaks that none of this have a live feel at all.  “March Of The Tripods” stands as arguably the most disappointing track on this whole disappointment of an album.  Clearly written as the song that could be pushed to some program director that thinks they are cutting edge, this quasi-ballad sounds like every cookie cutter band that’s not as good as Killswitch Engage, not as hard as Lamb Of God, but needed to fill the time on specialty shows between the bigger acts.  In reality, that’s the biggest problem with the entire disc.  It just features music that’s not as good as most of what else is out there.

PITRIFF RATING – 3/10 – There’s nothing here that truly makes me want to give this album another listen, or even keep it for that matter.  It’s a flat, boring effort of trendy modern metal.  It features all the elements of popular metal today, yet isn’t as good as most of the bands making this kind of music in any area.  Between its overproduction and it’s underachievements musically, SONS OF THE SYSTEM is just not worth another listen.

Chris Akin

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