Armored Saint have had one hell of a run since they got back together for good 20 years ago. A series of albums loved nearly as much as their initial ’80s output followed, as well as major jaunts alongside the likes of W.A.S.P., Michael Schenker Group, Queensrÿche, and so forth. I’ve been all for it, as this band never ceases to amaze me onstage, despite their reunion outings, even at their strongest, never cutting it for me the way March of the Saint (1984) or Symbol of Salvation (1991) does. I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s a quality to those early AS albums that’s simply missing from latter day affairs…or rather was missing until the release of their latest effort, Emotion Factory Reset.
I did address the pseudo-modernization of the band’s sound in my review of their last album, 2020’s Punching the Sky, which has since grown on me. Perhaps it was that. Perhaps it was unintentional prog-isms courtesy of bassist Joey Vera. After all, three decades in Fates Warning will do that to a man. On the contrary, Emotion Factory Reset stands apart, coming off like a spiritual successor to Symbol. If the band had stuck out the grunge era and John Bush had never joined Anthrax, chances are this is the type of album we would’ve gotten from them circa 1993. And let me tell you something: This record absolutely smokes.
More so than any reunion era AS album before it, Emotion Factory Reset boasts a murderer’s row of fast, straightforward, ripping headbangers reminiscent of their earliest, armor-clad days. Cuts like “Close to the Bone”, “Hit a Moonshot”, and the closing “Epilogue” boast those air-guitar friendly post-NWOBHM riffs, a thumping rhythm section, and the unmistakable vocal stylings of John Bush, who sounds as vital today as he did in 1984. On the contrary, more hook-driven songs like “Every Man – Any Man”, “Not on Your Life”, and “Compromise” conjure the sublime majesty of the Symbol days. I’ll say it ’til I’m blue in the face: That album deserved to sell the way Metallica’s Black Album did, and new songs like these prove that AS still boast the songwriting prowess that their old “Enter Sandman” tourmates lost many moons ago.
Sonically speaking, Emotion Factory Reset even sounds better than the last few AS albums, and by “better”, I mean more old school and organic. Upon interviewing founding guitarist Phil Sandoval, this was not a conscious decision on the band’s behalf, but rather just how things transpired. Perhaps it’s just me, but the more I spin this album, the more I’m buying into the narrative presented in the paragraph above, that this really is Symbol 2: Electric Boogaloo, brought to us by some bizarro parallel dimension. The only thing keeping me from fully believing this theory are “Buckeye” and “Ladders and Slides”: A couple average slabs of modern rock that lie closer to Alter Bridge than anything I’d associate with these U.S. metal warriors, and would be characteristic of their last album.
In a world in dire need of an emotion factory reset, leave it to Armored Saint to smash that button with lethal confidence. If you’ve loved everything else this band has ever done, there’s no reason you won’t love this album too. And if for some reason you’ve never given this band a listen, in which case I’m assuming you either A. Live under a rock, B. Are under 50, or C. Have stumbled upon this here webzine in between visits to other, inferior online metal outlets, Emotion Factory Reset is as acceptable of a starting point as anything released by AS between 1983 and 1991. Indeed, they can deliever!
8 out of 10
Label: Metal Blade Records
Genre: Heavy Metal
For fans of: Judas Priest, Vicious Rumors, Trauma
Leave a Reply