Although often tagged with genre labels such as grunge and nu-metal, Trapt has always been a much more exciting and exploratory band than those categories suggest. I hesitate to say they are better than their peers in such realms, but I have always found them to be too melodic to be merely a grunge band and much more original than their nu-metal compatriates. This makes them…okay, let’s say it, better than a lot of the competition. Hey, it’s my review, my opinion.
And their latest album, The Fall, their eighth to date, is more than enough to justify such a bold claim. While it has its big, sky-searing sonic moments and anthemic highs, it also plays with understatement and restraint. There is melody as well as merely muscle, groove and grit are tempered with grace and often breathtaking grandeur, there is power of course, but also poignancy.
“Try It First” does have echoes of 90’s nu-metal vibes, but it doesn’t just set out to be big and brash, and amongst its coiled riffs and spiralling guitar lines, you find a sonic sweetness that only comes with maturity. And such a delicate balance of such opposites is a perfect way to set out the sonic stall. It means that when you come to songs such as “Think of You,” essentially a modern take on the power ballad, you can appreciate what Trapt has grown into over the thirty years of their existence.
Sure, there is still room for the fist-in-the-air rocker such as “Above It All’s” staccato grooves and “Safe Here In The Shade’s” more old-school moves, as well as the slower paced yet intense “My Devices.” But, for my money, Trapt is in its element when ebbing and flowing between bombast and beauty, as they do with the brilliant “Drop Your Guard.”
Old rockers never die; they just make music more appropriate to their age, and if The Fall is anything to go by, that music is more mature, more experimental, more interesting, and more exciting, unguided by the fickle winds of fad and fashion that may once have weighed them down.
Ironically, The Fall sees the band rising to the top of their game.
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