The Acacia Strain has been a band I respect but don’t love. This album, though, makes it to my #7 spot. It’s about a dystopian future where “humanity tries to escape an omnipresent being run amok.” It’s a cool story, but I wouldn’t recommend it to the “uninitiated” due to its misanthropic views and general miserableness. It’s a tough work to sift through, as there’s almost no optimism offered here. MOURNING STAR begins with “Stand in the ashes of a thousand dead souls / And ask the ghosts if life was of consequence.” Elsewhere, “God and the Devil are one and the same / All the demons are here and we’ve given them names.” I think my favorite is WORLD GONE COLD, where the protagonist mourns the loss of a loved one: “Heaven only feels so far because of this weight on my chest / This feels worse than dying / I watched you die…”
It’s a tough album, because although it is a concept album about a dystopian future, it’s obviously meant to parallel our actual world. All the grief, pain, greed, and misery in the world, it’s kind of a miracle we don’t collapse under our own weight. I think the thesis of the album is that if God allows such things to happen, he must be held responsible for it as well. Probably the line that hit the hardest was on ACOLYTE OF THE ONE: “The earth is a worm-eaten corpse – we love it just because it exists.” And I think that just sums up this whole album. While I don’t come to the same conclusions about God or humanity, I do empathize with it.
Musically, it’s just as dour. Low-tuned guitars, fuzzy bass, immense drums. I love the way this thing is mixed, and I think Matt Guglielmo is becoming one of my favorite heavy drummers (he will appear again on this list later).
An album that’s not for everyone, and it’s not even an album I expect to listen to that many more times. But it affected me so much that I included it here.
The Neimans 
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