Option Paralysis and The Slip are the two examples of playing safe working out that first come to my mind so I'll use them to corroborate my point that if you know what you're doing and you know you're doing it correctly, you're free to play safe all you want. Axe to Fall's another good example. Or hey, Razor's career. Best of all still is Amon Amarth – Twilight of the Thunder God: for all I care their inspiration might have come from a Metal Blade memo containing a list of criteria entitled “Things your next album, which will be called Twilight of the Thunder God, is to include”, the memo might have even come to a bunch of session musicians who did all the work because it doesn't prevent the album from being extremely tolerable, even pretty good at times.
In fact, being considered a legendary band is mostly rooted in being seen as quite good by the largest number of people. What comes to success, ambition is not the first go-to virtue. Being consistently okay, though, that is something. Once the songwriting skills are nursed to the point that one's reaction to your output is “that is really really okay, I'm impressed, holy shit wow. That is the most okay thing I've heard in a long time”, a little dose of unique novelty will cement you in history.
So my thesis is that a critically successful album will rarely have defining, historical musical moments but it will absolutely never have terrible ones, and that's a very lubricated rope to balance on atop a crocodile lake indeed, consistency is key, one mistake ruins everything. Well, not everything, but it has a huge negative impact on the plan.
Keep in mind that Prepare for the Mindscan the EP is absolutely nothing new. The first thing that comes to mind when you hear grindcore, powerviolence, a few stock 'evil' black metal chord progressions and frontrabiddog put together is what this release is like. Production is a bit tricky but for the most part takes a back seat, the lyrics are appropriately unintelligible as they should be, guitars stick to the 101's for the most part despite a few more memorable sections, drums feature a few nice subtleties to keep things interesting when no one else can. You know the drill, trust me.
Considering the length of the tracks, it's logical that they'll have to complement each other by way of timing variation and fillers correctly in order to form a cohesive whole. Prepare for the Mindscan are certainly aware of this and have been aiming at that butter zone where the entire almost 13 minutes of material are super fucking okay by way of this trick. It works splendidly for the first half and then something happens. It was always an absolute given that the EP was bound to have one of those chug a note bash the splash breakdowns eventually, the real problem is the timing. Once they decide to get more ambitious with “Driven to Kill”, the whole scheme falls apart. We have satisfying dynamic work at first, the introductory idea is developed from beginning to variation to pre-transition. Meanwhile, the breakdown is by nature some sort of a climax. And it comes straight after the intensity descends so the section can repeat or a new one can be introduced, resulting in a very jarring peak of intensity. If this track were an intensity graph, there would be no derivative at the part where the breakdown starts. After the awkwardly long breakdown, the band proceeds to act as if nothing happened and just continues the track with no mention of it ever again. Was that breakdown there as an easter egg to check whether someone was paying attention, like when a teacher is too proud to admit that they are human?
Long story short, they never recover from that blow. They certainly tried during the first half to ensure that every track brought some new element to work with, but during the latter half they simply don't. There was a breakdown present before, too, so “Driven to Kill” doesn't contribute much of anything. To this I tell the band that you surely didn't run out of ideas after five fucking minutes, now did you, or did you really?
There was a Cracked article I saw once that claimed that the song before the last on a shitty release will invariably be good, and this EP doesn't differ, so I'll ignore that one, meanwhile “Die for Weed” and “Rise of the Machine Elves” are, respectively, subpar and really subpar. It's not that the second half sounds like a different band, it's more like the same band on the next day with a hangover. More to the point it sounds like they suddenly got lazy. They had some things going for them and they had the elements to craft a very very good release, but they couldn't be assed to do so. Goddammit.
And then there are the fucking b-movie samples to begin a release. Right, I guess it's a tradition or something, a way to get the audience worked up, I don't know, but after it's been done as many times as there exist metal releases, does anyone get excited about some random intense dialog? If it hardly even sets the tone then there is no point for it entirely. What is the thought process when someone decides to splice in a minute long “I'll move heaven and hell to get you” analog that has no reason to exist at that given spot? I really want to know.
