Diesel Machine
Evolve

Sensational comeback is something I read about Diesel Machine and their recent album Evolve. It is the band’s second release and it follows twenty years after the debut. I think they should have changed the name as I have had this album in the playlist for months without ever feeling the need to play it, diesel is just a boring thing – fuel for tractors and trucks as well as lousy cars. The album art doesn’t really help triggering a response of curiosity, but eventually this one got played and now even enough for me to write about it. Still, the question is if it hadn’t been better not to bother with the album, just toss it like I have to do with so many of the albums I get to review.

Not that it is a bad album, it is pretty good in its groovy thrash kind of style. Compared with the likes of Pantera, Machine Head, Sepultura, and more like that, it means a groovy and catchy powerful style of metal. The vocalist growls, the songs are pretty catchy, the production is fine and modern, the vocalist is good. Overall it is fine craftsmanship, but the work is derivative and lacks imagination. That can certainly be a problem if you want to wow people with what you are doing, derivative works can never be as exciting as original ones.

And while this album is more than fine to listen to, I like it now that it spins in my player while I write these words. But it isn’t really an album that makes me want to listen, just having as background is fine but really sitting down and just listening is another matter, and not as fine. The issue I have is that it feels kind of pointless, like so much in this world it is just repetitions of what others have done and it doesn’t even feel like they try to make anything imaginative or fresh. But with such a strong craftsmanship it is not really possible to be too hard on them either, the songs are all good and there are no major weaknesses.

This would have been great twenty years ago as a sequel to the debut, but they would have needed to evolve quite a bit to feel relevant today. There are just so much stuff in this genre, in all genres, and if you do it well but don’t stand out you will be forgotten, and that is where I think this album will end up. Fine entertainment for a while and then forgotten, as good as it is it isn’t exciting or fresh enough to stand out.

HHHHHHH