Review by Paul Monkhouse for MPM
Floridian arena-fillers Shinedown are survivors, the band of four brothers often standing side by side facing a hurricane. The fact that they’re now celebrating their twenty-fifth year together as a band is testament to their strength of vision and the fact that they can write anthemic songs that manage to fill huge spaces but also have the ability to intimately whisper into the heart of the person listening. This level of connection is shown in no uncertain terms in this, their eighth album and it could be their finest statement yet.
In a time where the attention span of the average user of TikTok has gone down to a blink and you’ll miss it three seconds, the necessity to hit people hard and fast to hook them in has become a priority. Shinedown though do things their way, having built up a relationship of trust with their fans and whilst ‘EI8HT’ contains a hefty eighteen tracks, there’s never a sense that they’re meandering but instead are taking their time to say exactly what they want. You can’t doubt their intent either as the textures that are woven throughout the release show different sides to the band and little touches abound, new alleys walked down but never straying too far from their chosen path.
‘EI8HT’ manages to hit all the right targets that the fans have come to know and love, huge hooks and addictive choruses abound, also throwing in some echoes of other bands into the mix in some places as the opening of ‘At the Bottom’ sounds like prime Smashing Pumpkins and the guitar intro of ‘Three Six Five’ has the same pattern as Def Leppard’s ‘Hysteria’. Beside these faint reference points, this is Shinedown at their imperious best and is likely to accelerate their world domination.
Numbers like ‘Dance Kid Dance’, ‘Dizzy’ and ‘Imposter’ are just made for festival audiences to absolutely lose their minds to, slabs of adrenaline filled goodness that rock hard but with a pleasingly commercial hook that means they’ll be loved by so much more than the pure rock community. So many tracks here would be perfectly suited to soundtrack a Hollywood blockbuster but there’s so much depth here too as closer inspection of the lyrics of the frantic and flying ‘Machine Gun’ reveals.
There’s also an intelligent use of dynamics at play, the two year gestation of the project bringing many moods as life affected the art being created. Again, this is arguably the key strength of ‘EI8HT’ as the rawness of emotions is subtly put into words that never hammer the narrative home but instead eschew drama for genuine soul. You can enjoy the wild and heavy duty ride of ‘Safe and Sound’ but the subtle banjos and strings of Country rock ballad ‘Searchlight’ and the dark, skittering electronica of ‘Deep End’ hit very differently. Additionally, there’s the hints of the sort of Baroque pop that both late period The Beatles and ELO made their own in ‘Back to the Living’ that are just shimmering with class and style.
Despite the odds, there isn’t one single track on this album that drags or feels like filler and that in itself is a testament to a band who put all they have into every note. It may be a little early to say, but in ‘EI8HT’, Shinedown have released the rock album of the year. Incredible.
PRE-ORDER EI8HT HERE
