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Megadeth: Risk Heavy Metal Capitol Records August 30th, 1999
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Review
Risk, an album that was so negatively accepted that the band who wrote it doesn't even play the material live aside a very rare occurance. Considered Megadeth's sell out album, and often misconcieved as disliked by even the band themselves, this release is a varied musical release that is very far from anything associated with this band's name in the past. But, is Risk really that bad an album, or are the fans just overexaggerating due to the lighter sound recorded here? To be blunt, Risk is actually not that poor an album, however it does have it's moments where you'll want to take the disc and snap it in half. For instance, right from the start, you get bombarded with the track "Insomnia" and it's extreme randomness in the intro, and then throughout the rest of the song with it's rather annoying just-loud-enough-and-off-tone background guitar playing a weird egyptian-type sounding riff that is absolutely out of place. That same guitar sound can be heard through the heavy Metallica sounding track "Prince Of Darkness" which just feels insanely drawn out after the first few minutes. If you actually make it past the first two annoying as sin tracks, you get a nice little interlude that segways into what seems to be the very "sell-out" portion of the album with the track "Crush 'Em" being a very solid, slower paced anthem track that could easily appear in some sort of Gladiator based action film, and "Breadline" which is your basic ballad, nothing too impressive but still tight enough with decent guitar work that it doesn't come across to mind-numbingly generic. The sound of "Breadline" continues through the album from here, all of which are very solid, well performed tracks, with the exception of "The Doctor Is Calling" which just sounds like a filler track, and "Ecstasy" would have been a lot more enjoyable without the vocal distortion used to make it sound like Dave was singing underwater for every part of the song but the chorus. So, with a few songs that just really sound terrible, and "Ecstasy" with a bad choice of using vocal distortion when it really isn't necessary at all, the only other complaint towards Risk would be that "Time: The Beginning" actually sounds like the recording quality of the vocals, as well as the bass, were recorded higher, causing a bit of over modulation to happen that didn't on any other track. The album doesn't really have anything too astonishing, but it still has plenty of solid songs on here, regardless of how light they are, or how "sell out"ish they seem. It still would be wise to not take this album on as one of your first Megadeth experiences, but it really is not as bad as the fans make it out to be thanks to a few solid slower paced tracks.
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