Seether - Poison the Parish

This didn’t come out recently, but I meant to give a few quick thoughts on it, so here they are. I have honestly not listened to the damn thing in probably a month, but only a few moments on the album stuck out to me at all, much fewer as positive, and I have had so little drive to refresh my memory of it because of how painfully bland it has come across with each time I hear it. It’s full of basic post-grungy alternative rock and metal with little imagination and vague lyricism, any band’s name from this lot of 2000’s alternative rock and post-grunge bands could have been on the cover. I’ve enjoyed previous Seether albums (Karma and Effect mostly), but they’ve largely been a band who I cherry pick songs from rather than sit through an album of, and their work has been on the decline for a long time now. Consequently, I only see life getting harder for Shaun Morgan and company if they maintain this trend, and they could easily find themselves in a relegation battle as they slip away in relevance in the years to come. The part of me that found deep connections with songs like “Rise Above This” and harmonized with “Remedy” hopes that they buckle down and challenge themselves to make something better on their next album, but I can’t attach much expectation onto that hope.