Attention Attention
DEVIL gives Attention Attention a sharp opening after its brief introduction. The riff has a restless bounce, the vocal sounds tightly wound and the production keeps the rhythm pressing forward. Shinedown's sixth album is unusually interested in how a rock song can move as well as how large its chorus can become.
Eric Bass produces the record with a clear ear for percussion, low-end weight and electronic detail. The guitars remain important, but they share space with sounds that give the songs a more deliberately constructed pulse. BLACK SOUL benefits from that approach, with a keyboard figure adding a different kind of hook around Brent Smith's forceful singing.
The title track changes the vocal delivery, using a more spoken rhythm before opening into a larger statement. The album's loose story follows a troubled character towards recovery, and those shifts in approach help the sequence feel purposeful. The narrative works best when the arrangements communicate the change, rather than when the words explain it outright.
MONSTERS is one of the stronger melodic songs, with a chorus definite enough to support its scale. EVOLVE brings back a harder attack at a useful point, giving the record a quick jolt instead of another extended rise. THE HUMAN RADIO is also effective, with bass movement keeping the groove alive beneath the additional production.
GET UP takes the reassuring side of the album into a more direct piano-led setting. Smith sings it convincingly, but the message is less individual than the delivery. Placing SPECIAL immediately after it also reduces the contrast between those two gentler passages. The record occasionally spends too long spelling out an emotional stage that the music has already established.
BRILLIANT supplies a more physical finish, returning the guitars to a prominent role without abandoning the album's rhythmic interest. Attention Attention is an ambitious, sometimes uneven attempt to make Shinedown's familiar strengths serve a larger sequence. Its best moments turn electronic detail and hard-rock force into a shared language, with enough clear hooks to make the experiments approachable.
