Review: The Autumn Offering – Requiem (2009)

I picked up “Fear Will Cast No Shadow” last year and, for the most part, I thought the CD was OK. I didn’t know much about TAO before McChesney, apart from the single ‘Embrace the Gutter,’ but I thought as a “metal” group, TAO was OK and that “Fear Will Cast No Shadow” was mediocre at best. They were good enough, though, to warrant my interest in their follow-up, “Requiem.’” I picked it up a couple weeks ago, loaded it up and was surprised.

The album starts off with ‘Curtain Hits the Cast,’ a heavy song with side-by-side vocal tracks: one clean and melodic, the other growling and awesome. The song has a catchy opening riff and a bad-ass drum sequence and guitar solo in the bridge. ‘Narcosis’ carries the torch, with an opening solo and all-pervading double bass kicks. The track has a great down-tempo bridge and continues the side-by-side dirty/clean vocals that ‘Curtain’ had.

‘Venus Mourning’ opts to alternate the melodic singing and McChesney’s growls rather than have the two play on top of each other. The song opens a little slower and feels like it might be closer to a metal-ish ballad before McChesney’s clean singing yields to his screams and the pace picks up a third in. McChesney’s clean vocals pick up again in the middle of the song, but with the double-bass kicks in the background, I wasn’t sure what kind of song I was listening to. He could have done all screams instead and it would have worked just as well. The breakdown at the end consists of a piano track, some light drums and a slighty distorted (read: raised treble, lowered bass) vocals.

The rest of the CD carried the aforementioned torch all the way to the end without missing a beat. The album is much better than ‘Fear Will Cast No Shadow’ – it’s heavier, harder, grittier, louder, darker… y’know, better! If you didn’t like ‘Fear…’ as much as you thought or wanted to, give The Autumn Offering a second chance and pick up ‘Requiem.’ If the album has any shortcomings, it’s the overall time: not even forty minutes. All of the songs are great, and maybe some of them sounded better short of three minutes as opposed to being dragged out to four, but expect to change CDs sooner than you might have expected – especially if you have a longer commute.

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(Image provided by Victory Records)