Lead Sails Paper Anchor
Hollywood Recordings, 2007
REVIEW BY: Cory Galliher
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 12/05/2007
When discussing Atreyu, then, it doesn't make much sense to call them "just another nu-metal band", since that doesn't really say much. At the same time, it's hard to call them anything else.
Atreyu isn't a group that breaks new ground by any stretch of the imagination. Instead, they follow the well-beaten path of bands like Disturbed and Spineshank by producing a prepackaged sort of rock designed to appeal to the Myspace crowd. Their latest album, Lead Sails Paper Anchor, continues this tradition in standard form; like the rest of Atreyu's work, while it's certainly nothing special, it's hard to call it bad.
The single "Becoming the Bull" has probably embedded itself in the radio-listening public's brains due to heavy airplay and the track's catchy underlying riff. It's not bad by any means, but the rest of the album effectively shows it up, even if the majority feels ripped from other bands. For instance, the opening track "Doomsday" calls to mind groups like Demon Hunter with its powerful bass and percussion work, "Falling Down" is a lighter, faster track that one might expect from Apartment 26 or My Chemical Romance and "Blow" could have come straight out of a Hinder album. These are, incidentally, the highlights of the album; the rest melds together in a sort of emo-metal soup which, while listenable, isn't really all that impressive and sounds like the filler from a My Chemical Romance album.
There's nothing necessarily wrong with any of this, and it's hard to argue that it's not high-quality music, but there isn't much here that listeners haven't heard before. It's definitely listenable, and the majority of it is even enjoyable, but it's not anything people will remember years down the line.
All in all, the biggest problem with the album is that it fails to distinguish Atreyu from the rest of the pack or define them as anything more than "just another nu-metal band."