ABORT Magazine™

Album Review: OSI – Fire Make Thunder

OSI
Fire Make Thunder
Metal Blade Records

From the Matheos-brainchild OSI comes a fourth studio album, Fire Make Thunder. With an ever-revolving door of band mates, OSI co-founders Jim Matheos and Kevin Moore are fortunate enough to have the freedom to experiment with the band’s sound and keep things fresh. In theory this should work out well. In practice it doesn’t make a bit of difference. With only a few solid tracks, the filler on Fire Make Thunder becomes painfully obvious. Like a bi-polar love affair, the album swings back and forth from legitimately powerful tracks like “Enemy Prayer” to the woefully lackluster “Wind Won’t Howl.”

With only two full-time members, co-founders Jim Matheos (Fate’s Warning) and Kevin Moore (Dream Theater), it may be forgivable to release such a lackluster album, if not a little bit surprising with the caliber of musicians present here. While a roughly fifty-fifty mix of filler and stronger tracks is not necessarily unreasonable, with an album of only eight tracks in total, the filler becomes more painfully obvious. That being said, the strongest tracks include “Cold Call,” “Guards,” and “Enemy Prayer.”

It can’t be helped but to say Fire Make Thunder is still, in the long run, an album not necessary to spend more than one listen on. As strong as the aforementioned tracks are, they scarcely manage to salvage this album from the pits of metal hell. The mere thought of an electronica-metal hybrid is sheer blasphemy. Period. Listen to it, if you must. But fair warning has been given.

www.osiband.com

By Chris Neuberger

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