Baby Metal “Metal Forth”
This has taken a while to process. The challenge before me is quite frankly making sense of something I don’t quite understand. While I’m a dyed in the wool metalhead, I do like to keep my ear to the ground for new sounds and styles that spark the dopamine in my brain. Yet Baby Metal, the Japanese metal superstars blowing up around the globe, have not ever really landed for me previously.
Admittedly, a superb performance at Knotfest earlier this year did burn away what was left of my ‘traditional metalhead’ skepticism, after the amazing collaboration with Electric Callboy months earlier broke my stereo due to constant, and extremely loud, rotation.
So, a new album appears, with the aforementioned track, what is the new stuff going to be like? By now, most of you reading would’ve heard it, so to give a track by track account would be foolish.
What has become clear though is Baby Metal is more than just a collection of songs. They are more than funky collaborations. To truly get them, you need the full package of the visuals, the dance routines, the lights, the videos and the outfits.
My first listen to the album showed the band in it musical glory, delivering hi octane, snappy, quite often brutal metal riffs and catchy choruses. On listening complete with the videos, those songs become something else altogether again. Something ascending to another world.
Flashes of colours, vibrant routines, epic set designs make those riffs meatier, the choruses soar as the dopamine zaps around the brain.
You start to notice quirky things like how Song 3 with Slaughter To Prevail lasts three minutes and thirty three seconds and is some of the heaviest and sickest sounds you’ll hear all year. Another hit of dopamine.
Or Momometal screaming while Moametal raps during KxAxWxAxlxl or that amazing drop as Tom Morello unleashes a solo you previously didn’t pick up through audio.
What about how great the crowd reacts during Kon! Kon! with Bollywood? The stage show just giving that burst of sensory overload we all need.
Contrast that with the understated performance from Poppy while literal Armageddon appears around her in From Me To You is a Baby Metal cinematic masterpiece.
I shouldn’t be surprised that this album took another life once the visuals matched it. After all, Knotfest already proved what a force they are when they get in front of you.
Who doesn’t love the theatre of metal? Our whole history has been littered with greats combining stage shows with epic songs, and Baby Metal are the next in line.
Baby Metal’s Metal Forth is more than catchy songs, they are a force of nature. In a world of short attention spans, they attack every sense, trap you into their world and conquer your conscience. You can’t take your eyes, or ears, off them for a second.
Album Review By Iain McCallum
