Reviews

A Life Once Lost enter your body in the same way as shrapnel from an exploding calculator.  It’s bright, and fast with little bits of flying metal and numbers all mixed together. Suddenly you are in a lot of pain.  You love it.
 
Hunter, ALOL’s follow up to their phenomenal Deathwish Inc. vision of fractals expanding A Great Artist, is successful in a number of ways.  The recording has been taken above and beyond anything accomplished with A Great Artist, and that record sounds great. Hunter just sounds huge, as if two albums were being played simultaneously.  It just feels enormous. 
 
A Life Once Lost’s stoner side is luckily still toking. With such hypnotic head-rolling and mind-fucking music, it’s honestly amazing to me that ALOL is touring with the remnants of the Greatful Dead, or whatever musical retro sham is bilking aged hippies out of their guiltily earned cash.  There is just so much happening in every song (caveat : the title track drags like a cart behind a mule) that getting stoned and listening to it on repeat sounds like an ideal way to explore the time changes.  However, I think ears would start to bleed. This is why you never see tech metal kids who reek of patchouli.
 
Hunter is stellar, better in every way than A Great Artist except for the fact that I don’t enjoy it as much.  There is tech metal zaniness and indecipherable vocals, but is there enough tech zaniness?  And what’s with guest vox from Lamb of God?  I’m sure Hunter will grow on me, the simple solidity (the only thing about this album that is simple) ensures an enduring metal classic has once again been delivered by five skinny boys from Pennsylvania.