Remember the last album from The Haunted? If not, let me refresh your memory. Revolver was a half-assed attempt at recreating their first self-titled album and horribly missing the mark. Everything came out sub-par and the only quality parts of the album meet merely the delightful designation known as mediocre. All of the intense modern thrash brutality The Haunted had gain with Marco Aro on their previous 2 albums was thrown to the wayside in a vain attempt to… well, to be honest I have no fucking idea what was going through their heads. Most bands don’t evolve and then regress in the manner that The Haunted did.

So 2006 arrives and here is The Dead Eye, the new album from The Haunted. Surprised, eh? Yeah, I didn’t even know they were in the studio, but apparently those Swedish marauders have been stealthily compiling this new album. After Revolver’s unwarranted praise subsided and the average metal fan realized "Hey, this shit fucking sucks," you’d expect The Haunted to take things to heart and re-examine their sound. Maybe they got a hint and tried to go back to the unrelenting sound of the Marco Aro-era albums? Maybe they went for something in a more German thrash vein? Maybe they wanted to re-incorporate their melodic death roots from their At The Gates days? Well, it becomes quite apparent why this thing dropped as silently as it did.

I’ll be blunt: this is the worst album from an established act this year and I seriously doubt even Cradle Of Filth can beat this in sheer incompetence and mongoloid song writing. First, this doesn’t even sound like The Haunted. Oh, that’s Dolving on vocals alright, but the overall sound comes across as a half-thrash high school garage band that decided to make an ill-conceived concept album using very basic The Haunted melodies while trying to hit every accessible riff that the Hot Topic catalogue had to offer. Second, The Haunted is incorporating horribly lackluster, out of place harmonious elements that only mesh with the music in the barest of senses. The slower parts are tepid, bland, and boring. The additional vocals are trite and useless. And there is very little to cause the level of aggression that past albums offered (Revolver included, even!).

At least Revolver was identifiably a record from The Haunted. This doesn’t even sound like the same fucking band. What’s worse is when you realize a good portion of this band was responsible for At The Gates, you get a good sense of just how far the mighty have fallen. What went wrong?

Written By: Necro-tron