Just a year after Juggernaut got out, Periphery bring us another piece of their vision of math metal combined with djent, and intertwined with –core elements. Unlike Juggernaut, Select Difficulty isn’t filled with crazy offbeat tempos, insane signatures and mind shattering breaks. This one is more aligned with djent and metalcore, but nevertheless, Select Difficulty has its insane parts.
The first two songs are proper brutal assaults on listener’s ears and minds. During the first couple of spins, it’s hard even to conceptualize what the hell is happening during The Price Is Wrong and Motormouth; sadly those two songs are the heaviest and most complex out of the bunch. From then on, don’t expect any sort of sonic revelation; most of other songs follow a classic formula of djent infused metalcore with few math elements.
It seems like the band run out of creative juices on this one. Most of the time you can hear simplified structures, switching of melodic and aggro parts, with occasional sympho elements. Although the lack of ideas is hurting the album, level of musical prowess is still unbelievable. You can hear that guys from Periphery know how to handle their instruments. Insane solos, disharmonic melodies, progressive drumming, all is incredible. Spencer’s vocals are a tale for itself, he can go from screeching snares to perfect cleans in a matter of milliseconds. Fantastic vocal variations make the strongest part of the album and are one of the reasons why in spite of most songs being pretty flat lined and easy to forget, the album is fun to listen to.
Production is at the highest level, every single chord is recognizable, down tuned guitars make for a thick sound image; vocals are put on the forefront, giving the listener a full experience, especially if listening to the album on some quality headphones. Other than first three songs, there are a few more of them which can be characterized as high moments. Absolomb has wicked bass parts, and nice prog structure. Prayer Position is another sonic fury featuring incredible vocal delivery, and is one of the few songs featuring intense math metal structure combined with chugging riffs.
All in all Select Difficulty can be characterized as a good enough album worthy of dozen or so spins. After that, it just becomes stale and uninspiring, with just a handful of songs remaining inside the mind. The title says it all; they apparently didn’t want to get their hands dirty playing on hardcore mode; instead, they choose the easy (today normal is the new easy, at least in video games) way out, making an album which is probably the weakest in Periphery’s catalogue, but it still has its moments.
