Flashback Album Review: Parkway Drive - Reverence

Today marked 5 years since Parkway Drive released their sixth studio album, the mighty Reverence.

Reverence marked a change in the sound of the band, which started out as Metalcore and the cover was taken from the painting The Fall of the Damned, by artist Peter Paul Rubens; a painting with religious and spiritual overtones.

Changes in the band had already began in 2015, where after the success they had already accumulating, they did not plan to stop the pace and their intention was to continue conquering the ears of metalheads around the world, and with Reverence they managed to achieve it.

I could say that Reverence was the album that showed 100 percent musical and lyrical maturity of the band, since here they made a much more polished work, heavier and with more melodic guitars, and whose lyrics cover topics about religion and death.

Wishing Wells, the theme that opens the album starts from top to bottom, a kind of calm sea to later start with a storm that makes you shake your head without thinking about it. Prey likewise starts with a very melodic riff in the style of Iron Maiden, perfect drums and Winston McCall's vocal changes make Prey an excellent song that can be enjoyed from beginning to end. Personally, I can say that these first two tracks are my favorites.

Absolute Power calms the waters a little bit, it is not a bad song but I could mention the first song that in my point of view I can classify as filler. Cementery Bloom is a kind of interlude that gives way to The Void, single of the album and whose simple riff is extremely catchy and shines alone along with a perfect beat on the drums, it is worth mentioning that the chorus and the chorus are incredible despite not being a very fast song.

I Hope You Rot is accompanied by choruses that seem to come out of Gregorian chants, here the band seems to want to experiment with symphonic metal, but without the need to sound tedious at times. Shadow Boxing could be said that it starts as a power ballad to later give way to the aggressiveness of the band with certain abysmal changes that are accompanied by violins, one more sample of the experiment that the band was trying to do. The same for In Blood and Chronos.

Another "but" I would put to the album is the closing, a piece totally spoken by Winston that makes you think about what the hell they were thinking to close the album that way.

Reverence is not a perfect album, at least not for me, but I think their experiment turned out well, powerful songs, crushing riffs that shine alone and the melodies of the guitars make you want to listen to it again and again, despite having certain passages that make the band sound like an attempt at symphonic metal.