Artist: Visions
Album: Home
Genre:  Metal
Label: Basick Records

When I review an album, I have a very limited time frame to get a good feel for the album, and render a verdict on whether it’s good or not. In all honesty, at times, I feel like it’s unfair to the band, I have to do this fast, heartless summation of an album to multiple bands every week, and some of them just get lost in the mix. Or even worse, some of them just come at a very bad time; any band that I reviewed the same week I had to review the new City & Colour album was doomed from the start, they didn’t stand a chance. And so, of course, after my brief acquaintance with an album, I have to move on to the dozen or so new albums I get to check out the next week, and that’s that. I often never get a chance to revisit the album. So over the past few months, I’ve devised a flawless, black and white method of passing a post-review verdict on an album. If it makes it onto my relatively low capacity iPod, it’s a good album, if it didn’t make enough of an impact on me to make it onto my iPod, then it wasn’t really all that great, it doesn’t mean it was bad, it just wasn’t great. I sort of wish I could go back to my old reviews, and just make a quick note of whether I still listen to it or not; the percentage is actually alarmingly low. Every week, I wonder which band is going to spark my interest enough to keep them around, some of them are obvious, they go on right away, others stick to my iTunes until I have a chance to really get to know them. Visions, with their new album, Home was one of the latter, I had to get better acquainted with them before I made the very serious decision of whether I was going to keep listening to them or not. First off, Visions is probably the second most popular band name at the moment, right after Empires, so that, however insignificant, was an initial strike against them. But if the music could make up for it, it wasn’t really something that would keep me from liking them.

Initially, I thought the album was quite good, and strictly speaking, it is, there really isn’t anything wrong with it as an individual entity. But that isn’t the only thing to look with this sort of music. As I’ve said before, the metal scene is crowded, and so it takes more and more to be able to stand out, it’s too easy for a band to sound just like just a regular metal band. So naturally, I have a well refined listening process for metal albums, first I listen to the opening track, then the closing track, as those two are usually the most impressive on the album. The opener usually being a fast, hard hitting song, setting the pace for the rest of the album, as “Attentive: Continuum” most certainly is, and the closer is usually an epic, powerful conclusion to the album, the last bit usually either in half time, or 6/8 – half time, in this case – and “Attentive: Reverie” fits the description perfect. It’s what I call my “They’re Only Chasing Safety theory”. All very good, textbook metal stuff. But I don’t want to hear textbook metal anymore. Any band can follow a template, but not every band can step out of it, and still manage to create something listenable, let alone something great. And that’s why Visions fall sort of in the middle of the pack, they’re good, but these days, almost anyone can be good.

Unfortunately, I only have 8 gigs of space on my proverbial chopping block, so I have to be fairly selective about who makes the cut, and because of that, Visions didn’t quite make it. I’ve got plenty of metal already. The album wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t as original, or as interesting as it would need to be if it were to make it on to my relatively limited access Ipod. What it really comes down to is that Visions most certainly has what it takes to be a good metal band, but perhaps not enough go the next step. Home is a good album, it just doesn’t feel like anything I haven’t heard before.

SCORE: 6/10
Review written by: Michael Hogan

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James Shotwell

James Shotwell is the founder of Under The Gun Review. He loves writing about music and movies almost as much as he loves his two fat cats. He's also the co-founder of Antique Records and the Marketing Coordinator for Haulix. You should probably follow him on Twitter.

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