‘EI8HT’
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SHINEDOWN – Ei8ht – album review
“…A lot can happen in a year…”, Brent Smith sings on ‘Three Six Five’ – the fourth track of a whopping eighteen on new Shinedown album, ‘EI8HT’.
Indeed, it can! The build-up towards what is, yes, their eighth album has been elongated with the pre-release singles stretching back to January last year. In that time the band the have played a huge set at Download here in the UK and well, not played a certain festival in the US which has led to a fair amount of criticism from all sides.
Whilst the lead-up to the album hasn’t been traditional, the band aren’t exactly traditional and have always done things their own way even where that courts elements of controversy. On record though it’s hard to argue with the quality of their work.
They’ve been on a musical evolution throughout their career, and each album or period of releases has had distinct identities. This new album however feels a little different.
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Across the hour and four minutes of music, you get glimpses of everything that has gone into the band over the past two decades, but you also get a band seemingly desperate to not just repeat what they’ve done before.
This does make the album difficult to pigeonhole but that’s not always a bad thing. Over the course of such a long collection however this does mean it can feel more of just that – a collection of songs rather than a fully cohesive album.
There are plenty of good songs on here, so fans of the band won’t be short of highlights, but undoubtedly the album would’ve benefitted by losing twenty minutes or so.
Still, fans of this modern Shinedown are going to get their fill with this album. A steady stream of radio rock friendly songs will have them eating for the next year or two until album number nine arrives.
The band may be marmite and will always have people talking about them. You just sense that they don’t care and will continue to do whatever they want. ‘EI8HT’ is the album of a band comfortable in their skin but happy to cover it with fresh ink!
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