Reborn

Personnel: Jay Sakong (programming).
Audio Mixer: Will Putney.
Recording information: The Machine Shop, Weehawken, NJ.
Las Vegas rock sextet This Romantic Tragedy has gone through a major personnel upheaval in the two years since the release of its debut album, Trust in Fear, with half the band departing and being replaced. After the split, guitarist/singer David Diaz, guitarist Kyle Huender, and drummer Mark Neuhardt were forced to bring in a new bassist Evan Eliis, a new singer, Sean Neumann, and, handling the death metal howling, Chad Dague. That may help explain why the second album, appropriately called Reborn, sounds like about three different groups, sometimes playing at the same time. In its basic form, This Romantic Tragedy is one of those "Jekyll and Hyde" thrash/death metal bands in which screaming and singing alternate above the usual heavy metal pummeling. But this is a group that likes to switch things up, often right in the middle of a track, so that, for example, they turn toward synth pop halfway through "Such Simple Words," while "The Warning" slows down into a spoken word recitation about reality and consciousness, and a choral part intrudes in the middle of "Red Rodl Rowwen." One way to describe this is ambitious, but metal fans may find that This Romantic Tragedy simply has too many moving parts in this configuration. ~ William Ruhlmann