Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)When you order this album, you will receive two CDs; one that is the new album, and the other that is their live set from the 2006 San Francisco stop of the Warped tour. If anything, this is a must buy for the live CD. There are some moments where you can hear Paige interacting with the crowd that are pretty funny.
The new material is all in all pretty good. This is a hard album to describe because there are so many different styles going on here. I will try to point out some highlights.
While the songs all have the Helmet sound, there are a few songs where Paige has taken a step out of his mold. And to me, these are the better songs on the album. In particular, I find LA Water to be a direction that I would like Helmet to go. It is still heavy, but it is more complex and layered composition. It even has some good melodies in it. Easily the best song on the album to me.
Another great song is Seeing Eye Dog. This is a nod to old school Helmet. Its main riff is heavily syncopated ala Meantime. You are just slapped in the face with a wall of guitar sound.
Interestingly, Helmet have chosen to do a cover song for this CD. That song is And Your Bird can Sing, by the Beatles. A peculiar choice, but it works somehow. When I first heard it, I didn't realize it was a cover, but all I could think was "So this what Paige would sound like if he was going to write a song in the style of Boston."
Another stand out track to me is "She's Lost". Again, its a wall of guitar that just hits you. The drums come in followed by some screeching guitar until the singing starts. This too is a song that has a more melodic feel to it, but it is still true to Helmet's sound.
The rest of the album is pretty good, but it is pretty standard fare for other Helmet. It mostly resembles songs from Size Matters and later. IMO, Paige needs to stop screaming. It just doesn't work anymore, so he should just save his voice. And that would probably be my main negative comment about the CD. Fortunately, he doesn't do it too much. Certainly he screams less than he did on Monochrome.
Some of you may think to yourself that "Why would I want melody in a Helmet song? I listen to them to head bang. This guy is crazy." To put this in perspective, Meantime came out while I was in high school. I loved the heaviness and aggressiveness of that album. I still like that today, but that was about 18 years ago. My tastes have evolved to more than just fast and heavy power chords. I usually need more to keep me interested. Paige can write some great complex songs and still be true to the Helmet moniker. Some of the songs on this album show to me how much better some of his songs can be if he were to expand beyond just heavy riffs. Don't get me wrong, he is the riff writing master, but I hope that this is a direction he continues with, either with Helmet or another band.
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Seeing Eye Dog, HELMET's seventh album, is one of the band's most uncompromising and ambitious releases, embodying the classic and utterly unique Helmet sound and pushing it into regions the band has never before explored. One big reason for that spirit of musical adventure is the record is essentially self-released (through the Work Song label). "I just felt completely free to do whatever I wanted to do," says frontman Page Hamilton. "It was really fun to make this record because I just felt this...freedom."
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