Manifesto

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It's really amazing how quickly musical styles can go from groundbreaking to old-fashioned in just a few short years; and the length of any given "fashion cycle" only seems to be getting shorter, at the same rate as the average teenage attention spans. This is precisely the dilemma facing Germany's Deadlock, whose reward for sticking to their light-and-dark musical contrasts and beauty-and-the-beast vocal stratagems over a decade-long career is having their fourth album, Manifesto, panned for sounding dated on arrival in late 2008. Sorry guys, but that's just the way it is with melodic metalcore at this specific point in time — never mind that this very same genre was damn near ubiquitous throughout the mid-'00s — and so all of the band's efforts to expand their sound with innumerable foreign musical styles can only remedy the situation so much. For the record, these range from the full-fledged techno-beat intro, "The Moribund Choir vs. the Trumpets of Armageddon," to the title song's soundtrack atmospherics, to the Cookie Monster vocal-free ballad, "Altruism," to the unexpected sax solo in "Fire at Will," to symphonic mid-section of "Deathrace," and its utterly stupefying rapped coda. In Deadlock's defense, their personal brand of melodic metalcore still stands out from the masses due to co-vocalist Sabine Weniger's crystal clear singing, which is very reminiscent of Lacuna Coil's Cristina Scabbia. But at the end of the day, Deadlock's oftentimes brave and unquestionably well-intentioned efforts to shake up those tired metalcore formulas feel too forced and scattered to succeed completely.