Animal
[Locomotive Music]

Easy Rider are heavy metal/hard rock veterans from Spain and Animal is their latest release and one thing that was able to happen while listening to this album is I was able to answer this question: Can an album truly be unlistenable? Let me explain.

There are albums that are just bad and you don't want to listen to it every again. Many albums have had that effect on me but they weren't unlistenable. Most albums have redeeming qualities to them and thus they are listenable but to a degree. Well to me Animal is an album that has zero redeeming qualities that make me want to listen to it. When you have to stop the album every two songs because you can't stand it any longer then you know you are having serious issues. So where does Easy Rider go wrong in my book?

First the vocalist, Ron Finns, seriously needs to go away, hide in a cave somewhere and never ruin another album with his voice. I literally cringe every time he opens his mouth and croons away with his raspy, clean and wavy voice. Musically, this album just bores me. There is absolutely nothing that catches my attention and either I find myself pressing the stop button or the skip button. These songs seem disjointed and forced because I feel no natural flow in the music. The way they are structured just doesn't make sense and I just get very annoyed by it all. For example, whoever thought that a song like "Walls of Hatred" needed to see light of day should be permanently banned from making those types of decisions. I swear that the verses could be put to good use in an interrogation room because anybody would want to talk if this was forced upon them. Production-wise Animal has a clean sound but it lacks some punch. The drums do not sound very powerful at all, the bass is completely buried and the guitars could definitely sound a lot heavier.

Yep, I can't listen to Animal. Thankfully as this review winds down it will mean that I never have to listen to it ever again. I hope that plenty of you don't have to go through the pain of listening to it just even once. This album makes the latest Axxis release sound like a masterpiece.