The first harsh vocals appear at 2:08, and for someone who hasn't listened to Periphery, that will probably be a surprise, as well as the well-built crescendo into the "drop" at 2:46 where the usual down-tuned, aggressive guitars come in with a reprisal of the first lyrical passage. The layering of sounds works very well, starting with ambiance, then clean guitars and nice timbres, and adding a twangy, Periphery-atypical sort of guitar sound at 1:52 with a (perhaps a bit overdone) accented vocal cue. I won't talk much of the ideas' arrangement in this song, mainly because it's effective, and I'll be doing a lot of that later with the more riffy songs. I am a drummer, and I'm not opposed to complexity, but these somewhat tossed-off parts are a poor fit for the simpler, softer parts of Periphery's music–they should offer dynamic and rhythmic contrast to the complex, intense core of Periphery's songwriting, like the other instruments do, not play Cool Fills. The roomy drum sounds in this song work, I suppose, but I feel that electronic sounds would have worked much better and been a better complement to the simplistic instrumental parts- especially given that Matt (drummer) is already playing around with the beat and distracting from Spencer's vocals within his first 10 seconds. I also appreciated that the tonic (the 1st scale degree, the root, or the "home" note) of the key signature isn't established until the drums and vocals enter at 0:41. Even though I listened the singles from Juggernaut before Alpha was fully released, the impact of that line sets the beginning tone for this song very nicely, following the clean guitar/electric piano material that establishes the main theme for this song. "Our voices echo on a quiet night" is such a great lyric. Some lyrical themes going through the album are: references to blood (echoed in several of the singles' youtube videos, nicely), "drowning", and "push and pull" which all seem to be related to the protagonist's struggle between their consciousnesses. I'm not much of a bard, however, so I won't talk about them much–they're not bad, at least. The lyrics, while doing a decent job of conveying the vignettes of the story and having nice phrasing & interconnectivity, hit a few too many generic fantasy images ("Silver faces, an unholy cathedral" is only the second line of the first song") for my tastes. The background vocals tend to lean towards what I would generously call "good attempts" at several different types of deliveries, which I'll talk about more as we come to them. His voice suits the material well and I think he's chosen good inflections for most of the parts–his screams and harsh vocals are really something to behold too. Spencer (vocalist) sounds really good in my opinion. It might actually spoil a lot of other albums for me. Wholly produced by the band, it's very easy to listen to, which I would partially attribute to what Nolly (the bassist/engineer) describes here. The simple thoughts I have about Alpha are as follows: Tesseract's "Concealing Fate" suite, though there's not much as blatantly obvious as that so far on Juggernaut, which I'll talk about. it's a simple concept in theory but I think it's a very effective artistic choice, especially when it hits the listener in obvious ways like having a chorus that comes back five songs later, i.e.
From my perception, the band intends this album to be a fairly interconnected affair, referencing itself throughout its runtime, which I will applaud as a composer. There are 17 tracks across the two albums, and Alpha contains what we can assume is the first half of the story, but I won't be focusing much on the story as the specific details aren't really necessary to evaluate the music in my opinion. According to them, it's a "theatrical" concept album–a concrete story hasn't been released, but as far as these things go, it's about a troubled person who has some sort of autonomous conscience within them that does Bad Things–told across the two albums. So! Juggernaut is a double album, comprised of albums Juggernaut: Alpha and Juggernaut: Omega, by the band Periphery (I'll refer to the albums collectively as Juggernaut). I have not listened to Juggernaut: Omega past its two singles, and I won't until this post is finished–I will very likely write a companion post to this doing the same thing to Omega and comparing the two. I have a lot of complex feelings and critiques about this album so I'm going to start out with a short history and the easy stuff, then go track by track through my thoughts about Alpha, having listened to the album 6-7 times since its streaming release. This is intended to be an in-depth critique and review of Juggernaut: Alpha by Periphery.
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