1. Heroin
2. Sick Sickness
3. Set it Off
4. Penetration
5. Skeletons
6. First Reaction
7. Momentum Fails
8. To You The Spoils
9. Carousel
10. Out of Shape
11. Pulse
12. Surrounded
13. Dead Room
14. Mass Exit
It's balls-out grungey rock on the whole, with anthemic choruses demanding a gritted-teeth, snarling singalong. Among the more powerful songs lie some more experimental tracks such as Skeletons and First Reaction, which play with different timings and complex textures.
Ironically enough, this album begins to go straight over my head from Momentum Fails onwards, with a series of non-entity filler tracks carrying a darker, more sustained, feel that doesn't suit this band so well. XisLOADED don't really do much to catch my ear again until the final storming track Mass Exit, which puts them right back on form, finishing off with a flourish.
I'm a little disappointed in this CD due to its arrangement of the tracks, which is so important when creating an album, if anything I feel that a band should use the latter half of an album to push the limits and go all-out to prevent the listeners' attention from dwindling, as mine does during this.
XisLOADED are a good band who can clearly write cutting edge, brash music to stir the soul, but I would have been much happier here with something of half the length, leaving me craving more.
www.myspace.com/xisloaded
Nik's rating for this CD is:
