The Agonist
Once Only Imagined

What is the point of all this? Why do we insist on producing albums of this kind? What is their purpose?
It seems that the trend of melodic death metal is really sweeping all metalheads, but those who suffer from all this are the ones looking for something different from the usual sappy band with some drumming burst and some more aggressive riffs, with a guy/girl behind the microphone who’s in the midst of a nervous breakdown and ends up vomiting on their poor instrument’s stand: let's be honest, it's all Arch Enemy and Angela's fault.

Oh dear, I've digressed, sorry, yet what I had in my hands when I listened to "Once Only Imagined," the debut album of the Canadians The Agonist, was truly a low blow. Either because there aren’t that many things to say here, or because this record is just another flat and dull release that has flooded the market for years. I feel really cheated by all those record companies that bring out these products to feed a bunch of fools in search of who knows what, and moreover, I feel even more ridiculed when such low commercial operations are carried out by giants like Century Media. Yes, because this disc, in addition to being extraordinarily flat, is backed by a massive production and produced by one of the major metal record companies.

But let's analyze "Once Only Imagined": summarizing what is found within the aforementioned product is quite easy since, for the scant 38 minutes divided into 11 tracks, the recipe is the usual one found in many albums of the genre, so much, so much, even too much melody, at times downright cloying, riffs that heavily borrow here and there from thrash, a lot (to be honest) from metalcore, a rhythm section never too fast or pounding otherwise the well-meaning people, who knows what they might think, but not so sparse as to confuse the album with something à-la Evanescence and, in this record, but only in this one, the alternation of angelic/scream vocals, both performed by the Pokémon, uh the girl with blue hair (stuff that arouses more interest from the toilet in my house) who, if in clean vocals manages to almost convince, in the scream parts ends up being truly ineffective, as well as unintentionally comical.

What else is there to say? Well, technically speaking, the five Canadians (except for the aforementioned singer in the scream sections) are not bad; you can tell there’s good preparation behind them, but here the problem has to shift elsewhere: in this album, you can only find a tedious reproduction of what's already been done by bands like Arch Enemy, the latest Dark Tranquillity, or In Flames of "Come Clarity".

Almost sorry to also fail the work of these five young people, but there is no other choice, here there is still a lot of work to be done to reach even just a decent level if they still manage to find someone to produce and protect them, hoping they also change direction, because this path has already been walked by so many other bands that have trampled it much better.