Review- Juggernaut:Alpha and Juggernaut:Omega by Periphery

Yes that’s right folks the time has come for the long awaited release of Juggernaut: Alpha and Juggernaut: Omega from the hard-hitting Maryland based band Periphery.  Placing at number 22 in the charts during its opening week, Juggernaut opens with a song called “One Black Minute” depicting life in the occult including human sacrifice and mothers being hung upside down, thus bringing us to the concept of this album.  Now they didn’t reveal an insane amount about what it actually is and what it all means, spencer only said that he gained a lot of influence from his knowledge of the occult. 

            Periphery has been in the game long enough to know what they wanted this and all of their albums to sound like, so it’s needless to say there were little to no production problems to this album.  My only gripe thus far with the album would be how much of the album they actually leaked before it came out,  after all the leaked songs there were only give or take 6 or 7 songs that we hadn’t heard.   The common fan would jump at this chance to hear the new and coming material but I sat there shaking my head because with all of this coming out onto youtube, who needed to pre order the album and take away the excitement of ripping open that packaging like a toy on Christmas day and just having that rush of adrenaline you get from the first listen off of a fresh album, having said that, I digress back to the material.

            In terms of material, this album really shows how far periphery has come from their first release.  It’s a really nice blend of all 4 albums (2 albums and 2 EP’s to be exact) that came before it, with the raw brutality of P1 and the technicality and orgasmic production value of P2 this long awaited record was the exact breath of fresh air that Periphery’s fan base needed.  They’ve teased their fans for a good 2 years before releasing any sort of real material before playing the song “Psychosphere” at Revolution Bar and Music Hall in Amityville, New York on their Escape From The Studio Tour in 2014.  From there they released my personal favorite “The Scourge” onto youtube and so on and so forth.

            All in all, the material is fresh and unlike anything they’ve ever released, from the (dare I say) “ballad track” that is “Heavy Heart” to the sheer heaviness that is “The Bad Thing,” I cant really point out anything REALLY wrong with either Alpha or Omega so ill give this bad boy a 9/10.