Label: Crusader Records/Golden Robot Records
Release date: April 29, 2022 (digital, CD) / September 9, 2022 (vinyl)
Production: Martin Sweet
Album length: 44.23 min
Genre: Glam Metal / Sleaze Metal
Rating: 9.0/10
When it comes to what they do, the Swedish sleaze and glam ‘revival’ metallers Crashdiet have few peers. The arrival of singer Gabriel Keyes has obviously managed to consolidate the lineup, which opened a new chapter in an otherwise turbulent career with the previous album »Rust«. »Rust« (2019, RockLine review) is a seriously wound-up record, one where the band, with no small effort, repeatedly floors you with an intensified, metallic wrecking-ball force compared to its earlier releases.
The new album »Automaton«, arriving two and a half years after its predecessor, cements that stance. It also confirms that the band has caught the right creative moment, carried over effectively from the excellent »Rust« and (happily) widened and deepened. Expectations for Crashdiet are always high. Simply because today they’re the best at what they do in the glam and sleaze metal revival. The best of their kind. »Automaton« is at least as wound-up as its predecessor, if not even more so. Judging by a few of the tracks, Crashdiet will surely also recruit some new followers into their ranks, people who are basically fans of European power metal. The mid-tempo, atmospheric anthem Dark Minds could easily fit on some power metal album. We Die Hard doesn’t escape that either – with one of the most pompous choruses on the new album, where the band tossed three-part harmonies on top of the opening line.
So the band keeps on blending pomp and bombast with limitless, wound-up energy. Flawlessly. Excellent chorus melodies, like the first one – caught right away in the title track – and a little later Shine On, confirm that the band has truly caught a giant wind in its creative sails. That’s why Automaton at the very least holds up the quality of its predecessor, and at moments it’s interesting how it now and then gallops off toward elements of power metal. Shine On is precisely such a moment on the album. When I single out the title track and Shine On, we get to hear two completely different approaches from the excellent Gabriel Keyes. On Automaton he’s raspy, cocky and boyish, a real rascal, which has always been Crashdiet’s pose (led by their very beginnings). On Shine On he goes for perfectly clean, authoritative singing, and he incinerates with an extreme high range that he develops especially in the chorus. Keyes’ explosiveness is a tremendous magnet, and the vocalist definitely proves on »Automaton« too that he’s in the form of his life. Shine On is very close to this approach with Powerline as well, featuring – watch out – Steel Panther vocalist Michael Starr as a guest. Both songs could easily be adopted by the Swedes Eclipse too. To put it crudely, parallels with the likes of Skid Row, which would have been fitting on an album like »Generation Wild« (2010), are harder to pick up this time.
The chorus melodies are once again striving for perfection. Alongside the pleasing variety, or rather the compositional liveliness, of the lead motifs, which rest on freshly honed inventiveness in the guitar phrases, the choruses are the cherry on top in achieving the album’s outstanding dynamic flow, and also its predatory grip, the kind that can give you goosebumps. Dark Crusade shakes you with incredible mockery, or rather metallic jaggedness, in the intro, which the infectious chorus carries in contrast toward a pleasing leap in atmosphere (toward a crescendo). Yep. That observation isn’t new for Crashdiet. They’ve always shone at this, only now they come at it in a considerably sharper, maximally metalized way. The phenomenal Keyes is put to excellent use. On every single track of the new album, which, over two years, is at the very least an equal continuation of the musical direction of its predecessor »Rust«. The album’s only ‘soft one’, the thoroughly successful ballad I Can’t Move On (Without You), is deliberately parked at the tail end this time so it doesn’t weigh too much on the high-octane core of how things unfold on the album, though its closing position also fits nicely when you listen, and ‘brings back into the game’ some of that trademark Crashdiet glam metal.
»Automaton« is an extremely compact and polished piece of work. It’s hard to take anything away or add anything. It works great. It grabs you convincingly. From the first second to the last. On it, Crashdiet are deadly to the core this time. Deadly? By their own standards, of course. That label is hard to square with glam and sleaze terminology, but times are changing (for us and for the band), and in evolutionary terms »Automaton« is even the darkest album these untamed Swedish scoundrels have put out to this day. This time around, the (at moments intensified) tinkering with the classic form of heavy metal, which here and there carries the new album more noticeably toward a power metal sound, may bother glam metal purists a bit. It certainly won’t bother fans of older albums by bands like, among others, Eclipse.
On »Automaton«, too, Crashdiet remain their own thing. The album bursts with perfect arranging that grabs you right off the bat. The ‘party time’ moment is definitely here, but it’s now and then upstaged by a pronounced metallic bite, or sharpness, and the occasional swing of darkness that gives this time’s Crashdiet pomp a special stamp. In every respect, after »Rust«, another extremely high-quality release, showing that the band has clicked more than perfectly with new singer Gabriel Keyes. So there’s no doubting that a quartet with such a potent run-up, and such performing and creative condition and form, will go on to hammer out even more of this kind of studio sneer in the future.
One more flaw, which isn’t even related to the music of the new album. The switch from Frontiers Music Srl. to Crusader Records/Golden Robot Records has, in promotional terms, done the band more of a disservice than a favor. A band like Crashdiet deserves the shelter of a bigger, stronger label with far more punch in advertising.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. Automaton
2. Together Whatever
3. Shine On
4. No Man’s Land
5. Darker Minds
6. Dead Crusade
7. Powerline
8. Resurrection Of The Damned
9. We Die Hard
10. Shell Shock
11. Unbroken
12. I Can’t Move On (Without You)
Lineup:
Gabriel Keyes – vocals
Martin Sweet – guitar
Peter London – bass
Eric Young – drums
Special guest:
Michael Starr – vocal duet on track no. 7
