Bolt Thrower - Honour Valour Pride
Review: While we may have called this band Bolt Thrower in the 1990s, they should probably be renamed Bolt Adjuster because that's the spirit of this album. Don't push your luck, and make that distillate of different elements centered around easy listening that is universal to all music no matter what its origin because the lowest common denominator is not a direction, but a lack of direction and a reversion into the self and what is comfortably unchallenging and therefore convenient background noise.
These songs mix up old Bolt Thrower riffs, stock-standard heavy metal riffs, cliches from atmospheric rock and lots of repetition. Gone are the interesting song structures; here now is the stadium rock Bolt Thrower. While that's marginally worse than going indie metal, it's about the same since both are panderers to the dumb solipsist in all of us, and as a result, this music is both unmemorable and evokes a queasy fear that life is passing by while this soundtrack to wasted consciousness flogs on, making someone a retirement fund but boring old fans and convincing the new this band never had any more vitality than the average CD-R bedroom black metal/disco hybrid.