Periphery
Periphery IV: Hail Stan

I’ll get straight to the point: we’re off track.

Or at least, let's put it this way: if it had any other name instead of Periphery, this Hail Stan, a title in honor of Stan Lee, would have been a fantastic album.

Powerful, ultra-technical, melodic, sophisticated, yet, in my opinion, it possibly represents the worst chapter in the Pure Riffery saga: the winning tracks can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and not even that, including the exceptional Reptile, the hyper-melodic It's Only Smiles, the brutal Blood Eagle, and the ballad Satellites, but the rest, to be honest, is not convincing at all; CHVRCH BVRNER is a poor imitation of the worst The Dillinger Escape Plan, Garden in the Bones apart from the usual incredible guitar solo, remains anonymous being neither heavy nor "light", Follow Your Ghost is as heavy as eating peppers early in the morning without the punch of classics like Zyglrox or others, Crush... what is Crush? A poorly executed hybrid piece of electronic and rock and finally there’s that jumble of senseless riffs in Sentient Glow, a mannerism without ideas and winning melodies.

As always, the production and execution are excellent, especially vocally (Spencer has outdone himself to say the least), but that is not enough to make PIV an outstanding album: far from the grand flights of the double album Juggernaut, and the immediacy of the PI, PII, and PIII trilogy, an album with undoubtedly high potential that holds its ground thanks to that handful of winning pieces, but alas does not stand at the very high levels of the previous ones.

Indeed, PI is superior in practically everything, PII is equal, if not even better than the first (at times), PIII despite the drop in tension, wins because it contains a series of real hits, Juggernaut remains absolutely untouched as it is a bold, experimental, and choral album like no other has dared so far in true Djent.

PIV would have worked much better as an EP, in that case, it would have deserved a solid 4 or 5, but the industrial amount of clichés and especially fillers burdens a soup that is becoming frighteningly more and more reheated.