![Cataract - [self-titled]](http://www.rock-metal-music-reviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/cataract.jpg)
Swiss thrashers Cataract have decided to self-title their fifth album. This is an odd approach for a band this deep into their career - something more usually done on a first or second album, when a band are searching for a coherent identity or finding themselves short of sharp ideas.
Listening to Cataract suggests that their reasoning is subconsciously similar; it’s an album almost completely devoid of innovation or originality.
A decade in the highly competitive European metal scene has certainly given Cataract the opportunity to polish their instrument skills, however, and there’s no faulting the astonishingly tight musicianship on this album. Cataract have a precision and rhythmic grasp that bands twice as old would do well to envy, extending from the slow staccato chords of the beatdown passages right up to the frantic fretboard assaults of the solos.
This instinctive feel for groove is probably the strongest hint of Cataract’s hardcore ancestry; it’s certainly the last remaining part of it. And this is the problem; coming from a band tagged with the increasingly nebulous “metalcore” label, Cataract doesn’t sound very different from the next vanilla thrash revivalists in line.
Every songwriting choice seems, paradoxically, to have been made as obvious and predictable as possible, with the end result that every tune on Cataract goes exactly where you expect it to. This may do wonders for listeners who revel in familiarity, of course, but it doesn’t do much to raise Cataract’s metaphorical head above the horde of bands belting out similar material.
Cataract have made the occasional effort to break out of the predictable song structures, but more often than not they seem to be using studio shortcuts rather than really pushing the envelope at a verse-and-chorus level. Example: the pointless and confusing backwards-masked rumbles and production trickery on the outro for “Tonight We Dine In Hell”, which achieved little more than making me wonder if my CD-ROM drive was playing up again.
Albums like this are always a tough call - it’s never fun to knock a band like Cataract who evidently know their instruments inside out. Even so, I have to call it how I hear it - and while I can’t fault their competence, no individual track on the album left a lasting impression. Cataract is mediocre thrash metal, played brilliantly.
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