After the April’s release of their second full-length album “Reckless And Relentless” , “Stepped Up And Scratched” is the remix version of their debut album from 2009, “Stand Up and Scream”. It’s pretty strange, or at least unexpected, while on their second album they turned to a much heavier side of their music, this remix album step back to the much electronic, “dubstep feel” content. So, they still trying to “Ride Two Horses at Once”, and definitively they will piss off one or other of their fans because metal fans will not digest this dance-club oriented mixes easily as the club music consumers are not huge fans of noisy guitars and deadly growls. If sexually it may be acceptable or at least tolerated to be bisexual, in the music business it’s pretty hard to take it both way simultaneously and keep on smiling just like nothing happened. The facts are facts: metal-heads always been extremely conservatives.
Riding half-butt on the metalcore “horse” and with the other half on disco/club music will leave everybody half satisfied and half frustrated. Actually “Stepped Up And Scratched” is not that bad and thinking of similar like experiences as Fear Factory’s “Remanufacture” from 1997, sometimes it might work, but still, I believe most of the consumers are bloody conservatives and really don’t like to get served with the soup and the stake from the same dish together. From my point of view, “Stepped Up And Scratched” have a few very intense and other very interesting moments, but well, it’s a matter of taste and… tolerance. For exemple, “A Single Moment of Sincerity” (Bare Remix) it’s one – and not the only – killer moment of this disc.
