The release of a new album by Machine Head is always a big thing. For me personally it is the hope that the band again puts out a legendary album like they did in 1994 with Burn My Eyes: The raw yet melodic vocals combined with the Bay Area Thrash sound driven on a hardcore attitude blew everyone away.
Unfortunately it has been downhill from there on for the band. Machine Head couldn’t top their dream debut and has in vain tried new influences and band members. Which didn’t do the band any good.

With their previous album Through the Ashes of Empires they stepped off the nu-metal sound that they were getting dragged down into further and further. This was a good thing, because the band wrote their worst albums (The Burning Red and Supercharger) during that period.
With the joining of Phil Demmel, who used to play in the thrash metal band Vio-lence together with Rob Flynn, the thrash is back. We could hear this on their previous CD already.
The Blackening has its good and bad sides.

Phil Demmel’s influences are there for sure and can somewhat be related to Vio-lence. But Rob Flynn has picked up the bad habit of using clean vocals that sound very weenie and makes a song lose all its power.
Another negative aspect about The Blackening is the length of the songs. There are bands that really know how to write a ten minute song without it being boring for one second, unfortunately Machine Head isn’t one of those bands. The Blackening contains eight songs, half of them are more than nine or even ten minutes long while they could easily be cool four-minute songs. Now they are turned into boring songs that just don’t seem to end.

So what do I think of The Blackening? It sure has its moments, and contains really cool riffs. In places you can even hear some flashes of ‘the old Machine Head’. But it’s still nowhere near Burn My Eyes. Shorter songs and no more clean vocals would have made a big difference.