Annihilator - Remains (1997)

Somewhere along the line, Jeff Waters started listening to a lot of White Zombie and Ministry, probably some of Prong's transformative works during this same period, and thus Remains was born, an album that is inarguably the most 'experimental' in Annihilator's catalogue. There are still a number of straight-up thrash tracks, which makes the album even more confusing, but the whole thing is a fucking mess that shouldn't have ever seen the light of day, even if Jeff had stuck with just one of the particular sounds he was exploring. I can't tell what's worse, the totally bland cover image or the music itself, which seems to utterly fail to grab onto a proper hook or chorus no matter which avenue of heavy music it is trying to explore, all of which feel pretty derivative, just not from the source they should have been...Annihilator's impressive debut years.

"Dead Wrong" sounds like "Walk" from Pantera, only mixed slightly more for rivet-heads with the vocal filter. "Sexecution" sounds like a bad Rob Zombie from the Great White North, only Rob would have tossed this track off his first few forthcoming solo albums for how unforgivably bland it is. He can't even stick to the same industrial metal sound, "No Love" goes a bit more like a Goth-y Ministry, and the album gets even WEIRDER than this..."Wind" sounds like a slightly more dissonant version of Rush, "Bastiage" sounds like some 80s synth music from a big budget 80s cop flick only with some chugging layered in. Keep in mind that throughout this, Waters occasionally swings back into thrash mode for tunes like "Tricks and Traps", and Remains winds up totally disoriented and disorienting and making you question why any record label executive in his/her right mind would approve this for release other than a test copy that would be immediately discarded to the nearest wastebasket.

If Jeff had stuck to one experiment and created something more compelling and cohesive, I would have happily forgiven the total sea change and perhaps even enjoyed it, but this is an album that lives up to its title as the corpsified 'Remains' of a once-promising metal band that lost its way completely in an age of rapidly evolving trends. And I don't say these things because I hate any of these other genres...I was and 'remain' a huge fan of industrial metal today, including most of what Jeff was probably inspired by, but this album simply doesn't do any of that any justice, and certainly not Annihilator. Production is all over the place, you can count the catchy riffs in the thrash songs on two fingers, and even the track list isn't laid out in any way where these broad strokes can complement one another. It would turn out to be a short-lived deviation, to be fair, but coming off what was already a pretty miserable stretch of albums with no hope in sight, I'm beyond shocked that the Canadian survived this one.

Verdict: Epic Fail [2/10]

https://www.annihilatormetal.com/