TIMES OF GRACE IS APPARENTLY GOING TO SOUND EXACTLY LIKE KILLSWITCH ENGAGE
A still from Times of Grace’s riveting new video. Kubrick couldn’t have shot it any better.
It was less than a week ago that Times of Grace, the new project for past and present Killswitch Engage members Jesse Leach and Adam Dutkiewicz, debuted their first video, for the song “Strength in Numbers,” and now they’ve already posted a second, “Where the Spirit Leads Me.” It’s debuted exclusively via Record Store Day and Metal Club, and while it’s not embeddable yet, you can check it out here.
The video itself is honestly not that interesting; it basically combines the worst parts of The Blair Witch Project (e.g., shaky footage of the ground) with stuff that seems more interesting when I watch it on The Discovery Channel (e.g., a swarm of flies doing… something). But it’s the second song we’ve heard from Times of Grace, and so it gives us a better sense of what the project is going to sound like — and, as we suspected, it’s apparently going to sound exactly like Killswitch Engage.
This despite the fact that that earlier this year Leach told me that the music “pulls from metal/rock/ambient shoe gaze type stuff, as well as punk and blues,” which is not evident from the material we’ve heard thus far. Of course, it’s possible that there’s other songs on the album which will match this description, and right now the band/their label/their other various handlers/whomever are deliberately playing up the KsE connection for the sake of selling the band to the lowest common denominator. But it’s also possible that this album really is just gonna be KsE Mach II — or, rather, KsE Mach I reunited under a different name.
And there’s nothing wrong with that per se, especially if Alive or Just Breathing is still your favorite KsE album*. But it does make me worry about the future of Killswitch — and no, not because I think they might break-up so Adam D. can concentrate of this band full time. When I wrote that piece about ToG’s first video last week, I included a joke about Dutkiewicz’s “massive encyclopedia of riff,” deliberately leaving off the letter “s” to imply that the guitarist has run out of ideas. (Vince even thought it was a typo and changes it to “riffs!”) Now I’m starting to wonder if I hit the nail on the head. For a long time, I’ve assumed that KsE’s sound hasn’t evolved because the band was complacent, but now I’m starting to think that perhaps it hasn’t evolved because they just don’t have any fresh ideas. That would be a bummer.
Times of Grace’s debut, The Hymn of a Broken Man, comes out January 18 on Roadrunner, so I guess we’ll find out then. Apparently the special edition of the album comes with eleven other boring videos, too, if that’s something you’re into.
-AR
*Although I don’t think this sounds as good as AOJB. Leach’s vocals have way too much digital gloss. The decision to produce him in such a manner is pretty baffling to me, since a) Alive did not have that problem, and b) I just saw Leach live earlier this year and he sounded great, so it’s not like he needs the aid of a computer to hit the notes. I guess Leach is just another victim of today’s preferred, antiseptic production style.
