BAND: ASSAYER
ALBUM: “AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL”
RELEASE DATE: OCTOBER 5, 2012
LABEL: INDEPENDENT
GENRE: THRASH METAL
RATING: 4/10
Assayer spent many a month crafting America the Beautiful, the band’s debut release, but the finished product fails to reflect nearly a year of studio work. America the Beautiful is an album that feels largely unoriginal.
The album begins with the title track, a generic thrash number with death metal shrieks and growls on top of the instruments. Unfortunately, it gets the album off to a rough start, sounding like a poor attempt at trying to play heavier than Testament.
The album is very lengthy; America the Beautiful is eight songs long, but the shortest song checks in at five minutes; many of them are longer. The album is comprised of many would-be epics, but there is nothing epic about these songs. They are just a collection of breakneck thrash sometimes yelled Jeff Hanneman-style, other times grunted and growled in an unintelligible fashion.
America the Beautiful has solid production. The levels of every instrument are well controlled, and the band is in time with one another. The riffs all tend to have the same guitar tone, but it is a powerful one; the occasional clean interludes are graceful and melodic. Each musician plays very well on America the Beautiful, but Assayer clearly is lacking originality in the writing process, and the production element does not reflect eleven months in the studio.
At the close of America the Beautiful, the listener will not feel like they have heard anything that has not already been done before. Assayer has made a valiant attempt at a great album, but stumbled into many roadblocks along the way, including unnecessarily long songs, an absence of originality, and a production value that does not live up to the time spent working on the album. Assayer proves itself a band that can play well, but that is all that will be remembered of America the Beautiful.
