Protest The Hero – Scurrilous

A lot has changed for Whitby, Ontario’s Protest The Hero since their critically acclaimed 2008 hallmark album, Fortress.  Traditionally a hardcore heavyweight, the progressive metal five-piece now powers ahead, turning to the likes of Iron Maiden for inspiration.  Against their backdrop of technical ambition Rody Walker has all but ditched his duel vocal delivery to focus on his pitch perfect Dragonforce-like screams.  He now soars high from start to finish, uninterrupted by his once punctuating guttural bellows. Consequently, their latest album, Scucrrilous, marks a significant departure from what fans might be expecting.

For the ten-track disc Walker sails overhead as if narrating a mythological quest.  Think epic on the scale of Blind Guardian or Orcs & Goblins and you’ll know what to expect.  But here marks another major departure – unlike most technical metal groups chronicling heroic journey’s, Protest roots their content in the present, taking ordinary, contemporary, or even mundane topics and giving them a metal makeover.

Many songs even have a certain tongue in check quality to them.  “Moonlight” for instance reads like the band’s tour log. “All hotel rooms are pretty much the same though the room number might change” wails Walker as he flamboyantly describes his surroundings, later jumping into life in the van: “press your head against the window, look outside at emptiness, tell a joke or take a piss, lock the door and start the engine.”  Similarly, “Tapestry” makes a battle march out of a bar going group of rejects so caught up in their own ill fated lives that they start proclaiming themselves kings of their little dive, referencing it as their “versailles, palace on the swamp.”  The album ends with the most ridiculous “Sex Tapes,” which smartly uses the metal mayhem to match the media frenzy surrounding one of these celebrity-slandering events.  Throughout all the jokes, soundscapes vary from volumous highs to simple, string led lows proving that when Protest commits to an idea, they’re never afraid to go all in.

Amidst the laughs the quintet also tackle some more serious themes, most notably suicide and cancer.  “C’est la Vie” opens the album preaching the simple message to enjoy life, dressing up cold scenarios with a poetic flare intent on exposing suicidal expressions and the illogical endings they represent (a favourite being “stepped off a building to find concrete evidence, concrete evidence that he’d never make an impact, fiction splattered into fact”).  “Tandem” succeeds through empathetic expression on the far-reaching topic of breast cancer.  “Everyone knows that cancer takes bites of every family, and it eats some families whole, dance around the issue, and take issue with the answers provided” wails Walker at the onset of what he later describes as a “song worth singing.”  It unravels as a tribute to the strength of any family waging this war, empathetic to the indiscriminant physical and emotional pain of those afflicted.  It’s a heavy handed topic, but one that needs a voice.

As might be clear by my focus, Scurrilous is a work best appreciated with a lyric book in hand – although with Walkers vocal shift, not entirely necessary for noticing all the subtle nuances.  While some Protestfans might take issue with the vocal altercations, I can’t help but be swayed by Walker’s raw talent.  Combined with one of the tightest technical displays out there, it would take some pretty elitist thinking to deny Scurrilous as one of Protest The Hero’s highest achievements.