Century Media
2006
The Dead Eye
About This Album
The return of original vocalist Peter Dolving before the Haunted's fourth album, rEVOLVEr, coincided with the respected Swedish metal band's first deliberate effort to break out of their heretofore self-imposed neo-thrash metal boundaries. But for those unadventurous fans who already bristled at that album's tentative forays "out of the box," their 2006 follow-up, The Dead Eye, may sound tantamount to stylistic treason. Here, token samples of the group's once dominant brisk thrashers (instantly recognizable thanks to their fast-picked notes, originating with Anders and Jonas Bjorler's legendary prequel band, At the Gates) like "The Medication," "The Shifter" and "The Stain" are exceptions, not the rule -- mere olive branches extended out of pity to those obstinate fans. The remainder of The Dead Eye (whose every track title stars with a "the" for some reason) finds the band trafficking in a variety of slower tempos (both "The Drowning" and "The Guilt Trip" get seriously doomy), experimenting with novel guitar textures (hear notions of Meshuggah, the Deftones and Isis in "The Cynic" and "The Failure"), and cutting Dolving loose to try all manner of singing approaches.
Track List (try tracks 2,3,4,5,7,8,9,10 and 12)

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