Hypocrisy - Abducted
Review: Moving further away from extremity toward sonorous pop songs, Hypocrisy borrow the resonant minor key choruses of bands like the Cure or the Smashing Pumpkins and match them to acerbic but rigid riffing and convoluted conception of transitional phrase, creating an immersive environment of rock music that aesthetically promotes many of the ideas of death metal before lapsing into its own sentiment and becoming maudlin, stimulating resentment and the generation of some of the vapid commercial works that populate the second half of this album.
Still within a framework of speed metal song structures and anthemic tendencies, Hypocrisy use briefly muffled chords or chords played open to fill song spaces with broad, absolutist proclamations which are complemented by melodic inclinations toward devolution of structure, balancing emotion against a primitive rationality in a conjectural impulse toward undirected and all-encompassing emotion; in this we see much of the heavy sentiment and morality of the stadium metal age returning, and with it removing much of the "death" from death metal in lyrics and concept. With this in mind, a summary of this album might be that the band who started small have now become fully in control of their artistry, and at that stage have reverted to their influences for the sake of making socially acceptable music.