The problem with Left Hand Path isn't what it does, it's what it hardly even contemplates: dynamics, fully articulated melodic content or any sense of purpose or direction. This is a painfully one-dimensional album; the meticulously muscular production cannot overcome songwriting with the conceptual topography of a sheet of paper. Left Hand Path is all brawn and no brain.
The exception is the title track, which opens with the menacing barrage of power chords so characteristic of the album as a whole, but breaks up the bludgeoning and creates dramatic tension with a doomy interlude before building to a powerfully melodic conclusion. It's a stunning vision of re-creation, the phoenix life rising from the ashes of death.
Unfortunately, after six-and-a-half brilliant minutes, Left Hand Path quickly moves into far less fertile creative terrain. The rest of the album is a vast featureless desert of half riffs and half melodies, strung together in patterns so predictable that you can hum the conclusion of every phase two bars ahead, banged out in barely perceptible variations of 'up-tempo' and 'mid-paced', until the whole project sounds like nothing so much as musical oatmeal - bland, tasteless and blazing a path straight to the colon.
The exception is the title track, which opens with the menacing barrage of power chords so characteristic of the album as a whole, but breaks up the bludgeoning and creates dramatic tension with a doomy interlude before building to a powerfully melodic conclusion. It's a stunning vision of re-creation, the phoenix life rising from the ashes of death.
Unfortunately, after six-and-a-half brilliant minutes, Left Hand Path quickly moves into far less fertile creative terrain. The rest of the album is a vast featureless desert of half riffs and half melodies, strung together in patterns so predictable that you can hum the conclusion of every phase two bars ahead, banged out in barely perceptible variations of 'up-tempo' and 'mid-paced', until the whole project sounds like nothing so much as musical oatmeal - bland, tasteless and blazing a path straight to the colon.
