DARKEST HOUR
So Sedated, So Secure
Victory
· An otherwise great metal reissue marred by ninth-rate bonus material.
Between signing more Duran Duran tribute acts and pimping adolescent heartbreak in the form of hilariously well-groomed MTV faves Hawthorne Heights, the hardcore veterans over at Victory have seen fit to re-release the breakthrough record from neo-thrashers Darkest Hour.
So Sedated, So Secure is the work of a band in the midst of a stylistic shift. Their early albums were the efforts of a band infatuated with straight-edge hardcore and a more traditional, punk-derived sound, and this, their Victory debut, saw the influence of more metallic elements begin to appear.
Five years later and it’s still a stone-cold classic. Opener "An Epitaph," "Treason in Trust" and the title track hearken back to the melodic riffing of Swedish thrash and the unrelenting drumming of classic speed metal, inducing the kind of furious fist-pumping usually only found on the top shelf at your local smut pedlar. The guitars gallop in all the right places, the double-kick drumming never lets up and singer John Henry shows that he’s a steel-throated man, his unintelligible rasp sounding positively polyp-forming.
The five bonus tracks Victory has tacked on, presumably out of their infinite altruism and not in some small-minded cash grab to hook in fans who already own the album, lack much in the way of redeeming qualities. A pair of decent covers (Pentagram’s "Be Forewarned" and Battery’s "Go Back to the Gym") are overshadowed by 10 minutes of drunken novelty-song tomfoolery, good for a laugh once but not much more.
THE ALBUM 4/5
THE BONUS TRACKS 2/5
JORDAN LANE
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