Josh, this is why I respect you man. LOVE your honesty. I tried so hard to love it and Wage War are my favorite band. I just can’t with this album. I’ve talked to Cody and Seth and they’re truly so freakin nice. Manic is such a good album. I feel like it was the perfect blend of what they’re trying to do. This unfortunately wasn’t for me. I’m happy that people are liking it though! No shade to them at all.
Wage War is definitely my favorite band, but this album was a swing and a miss to me. It’s almost like they decided to make the album “fun” rather than good, as in almost all their press releases they talk about how much fun the album was to make, rather than talking about how much they love the songs. Which, to me, it’s possible to be both fun and make objectively good songs. My main issues with this album relate to how it sounds incredibly sterile and lifeless. The guitars sound borderline MIDI because they’ve been edited to death. The side chaining is also a little overdone because some of the more electronic songs pump too much. On top of that, Self Sacrifice literally sounds like Artificial Suicide. To me it was apparent off the rip. Wage War always made digestible Metalcore but somehow always sounded a tad bit different, not they sound like everyone else. This album is probably gonna grow on me, but I respect how you’re holding your ground on it.
My only real disagreement with anything you say in this video is that Manic was a good album. Half the songs sound the same, they're incredibly bland, it's overproduced to hell, and honestly it's about on the same quality as Stigma. Both are like a 6/10 at best.
Album was pretty disappointing to me. My biggest issue is that even with this album you can tell that they're all super talented musicians but they just choose to write these pretty generic songs.
