3 out of 5

Label: Magnetic Eye Records

Produced by: Magnus Lindberg (mastered by)

This is an awesome idea for an album series, but it’s inevitably going to be difficult to execute from the start. Magnetic Eye’s Redux line has kicked out a series of full cover albums, redoing a classic (90s) metal / industrial / grunge album from start to finish via covers from other bands. The inevitability is in the damned-if-you-do quality of covers: deviate too much from the source and purists might get up in arms; do too little and it’s kind of a shoulder shrug – a Why Bother? redo. So for this front-to-back (+extra tracks) cover of Helmet’s Meantime, Magnetic Eyes mostly split the difference, and gave us half and half “traditional” covers alongside some more audacious approaches. But still, man, results may vary, and so I say again: awesome idea; difficult to pull off: the original is a classic for a reason, and one of those reasons is likely influence, so even when someone executes a nice magic trick and transforms Helmet into grind or something else, you hear the shadow of the original, in context of the original album, and are kind of getting confirmation of how great it is.

The set kicks off with several tracks that are essentially 1:1 covers, albeit with maybe screamier and growlier vocals. KEN Mode kicks off the latter half of Meantime with more ambition, finding a middleground between the debt they own to Helmet and their particular art/thrash approach, and then we get a nice run of tracks that shift more into prog, or grind, or giving Ironweed another crack at things with a vocals-only (!) track. I personally find this side of the album a lot more interesting and relistenable for exactly this ambition, but again – maybe you just want to hear X band impersonating Paige, and that’s not your bag.

A compressed version of this cycle is repeated in the bonus tracks – non-Meantime covers – which, given the more metal-oriented crowd, logically picks quite a bit from Strap It On, though we get a couple Bettys and Aftertastes in there.

While I think Magnetic Eye’s approach here was a sound one, and there’s not really a track that’s can be called bad or distasteful – just varying degrees of how far away from the originals they are – there’s one miss that makes it hard to bump the rating up more: the packaging. The cover art (Jesse Schaller) is fantastic, and the cover / back cover layout and font certainly nod to the real release’s art. But we got nothing on the inside: no rundown of band credits; no production credits; not even a paragraph to say why this comp was put together. There’s an argument for the lack of extras being kinda metal or something, and I recognize that costs may limit the options – especially considering navigating all the bands’ times, maybe whatever licensing – but the absolutely lack of literally any narrative / notes on the inside (we get a closeup of some Schaller art) feels almost dismissive; it doesn’t double down on the impressiveness of getting all these bands together.

When you hear a cover live, the intention is pretty purposefully nostalgic; when a band adds a cover to their own studio album, the context is that of the band to which you’re listening – even if they do a straightforward take, it’s considered alongside the original material they’ve offered. If you do a themed cover of an album (like all folk takes of metal tunes) that adds a whole new framework. But Meantime [Redux] puts you entirely in the context of an all-timer of an album, with metal covers mostly in the tradition of the source songs, and it’s nearly impossible to escape from that context, or improve / change the POV on the original material. Everyone participating in this comp commits to their tracks, but even with a nice range of metal styles that push and pull on the djenty / hardcore classics, it’s nearly impossible to not just want to dig out your own copy of Meantime and give that a go instead.