Annihilator - Suicide Society (2015)

And just like that, after years of gradual evolution into an Annihilator that was worth listening to again, the Dave Padden era had come to an end, and Jeff Waters took over the vocal duties himself once more, bringing in some other backups just to round out the production. Mike Harshaw of Feast and Re-Kill remained on the kit, and he gives quite a thundering performance on an album that is at once similar to those before it, but offers an even huger, more modern sound, and a lot more groove through some proggy elements as evidenced by the opening title track. The vocals here have a little bit of a sleazy hard rock vibe to them, but they at least work in the context of the track, and they are also captured really loudly at the forefront of the recording without dragging it all down.

"My Revenge" comes EXTREMELY close to "Damage, Inc." off Master of Puppets, to the point where it gets a little uncomfortable, and then the album continues to go off the deep end with the atmospheric rock track "Snap" and the punky-flavored propulsion of "Creepin' Again". Suicide Society brings in a lot of scattered influences and I think the album has a little more trouble finding its footing than the two before it. There's still a lot of energetic thrash, and some really catchy vocal passages that use the more smooth and melodic style that Dave Padden had also been using on some of the discs he fronted, but the lion's share of this material sounds like its transitional, Waters firing off some ideas and seeing what sticks, and the only reason this is all held afloat is because the production is just so enormous and straight to the face, brightening the punch of even the lamest tracks. I'm not saying its great, and some of the Metallica stuff is distracting (he even says "No remorse..." in one of them), but here's another case where you could render down the fat and come up with a very solid EP of ideas that push the band forward and backwards simultaneously.

Some great guitar parts, some derivative, it's almost as if Waters was trying to dig in and perhaps wasn't quite confident of where to go with this, but at the same time he had grown into a producer that can mix the fuck out of it all. At this point, he really could have stepped down and charged quite lucrative prices to produce and record other bands, because the thing just erupts from my speakers and in terms of 'modern' production its one of their best, again not losing speed or heaviness from the professional level of polish. But the songs here really only fire me up about 50% of the time, and I hadn't found myself ever returning to listen to this one before the review series. But for its flaws, Suicide Society still clobbers all the studio albums he put out from about 1993-2007.

Verdict: Indifference [6.25/10]

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