Trivium - In the Court of the Dragon

My favorite album of 2021

It’s a long one today, so buckle up!

In the Court of the Dragon - Trivium

If you saw the post of my top albums of 2021, you know that I ranked this album as #1. Given the type of music I listen to, this is completely unexpected. I’m not sure how it happened, but I guess I’m now a Trivium fan. I remember listening to a few songs on the Sin and the Sentence when it was released in 2017 and I even had Heart from Your Hate on my fall 2017 playlist¹. But the album as whole didn’t end up sticking with me and I forgot about them.

Fast-forward a bit. I had the day off on Friday, April 24, 2020 in the early days of the pandemic when we were all still trying to stay at home as much as possible. I remember I was excited about April 24 because Def Leppard was going to be hosting a Sirius channel (Octane, perhaps) for the day to promote their soon-to-be cancelled Summer 2020 tour. I don’t normally use Sirius, but my wife has a Sirius account that she uses with her car. And the fact that I was excited about Def Leppard should tell you all you need to know about why I didn’t consider myself a Trivium fan.

I lasted about an hour listening to Sirius before I just found it boring. Def Leppard were playing songs I didn’t want to hear and telling stories I had heard before. So I shut it off and fired up Apple Music. Since it was Friday that also meant some new music would be out.

I went to the Hard Rock category (my go-to) and saw that there was a new album by Trivium. I believe I had seen some promos for it on Apple Music, but had ignored them because I forgot about Trivium. In fact, I think I was even confusing the name with Trimonti, which I knew I didn’t really like. So Trivium had been ignored.

But on this day I was scanning the “New/Top Songs” section and saw Bleed into Me listed near the top. Since my iPhone was still hooked up to my bluetooth speaker from earlier, I tapped on it to give it a listen. I loved the initial bass groove and the vibe of the song. I tapped the “heart” and added it to my Spring playlist.

My daughter was sitting next to me and didn’t like the song at all, so I switched to my bluetooth headphones and tapped to visit the album page and I clicked play.

First, IX starts with its acoustic guitar and it builds and builds until “Go!” and then What the Dead Men Day. Holy Shit! This was amazing. I listened to the entire album in one sitting and then headed over to /r/Trivium to learn more.

I learned that the lead singer, Matt, would be doing a live play through of the album on Twitch later that afternoon. I set up Twitch on the Apple TV and set a reminder on my phone for the afternoon. I tuned in to hear this really cool, down-to-earth guy talking from the heart about the pandemic, the music and then he played through the album with the guitar parts and did all the singing. Damn, I was impressed. I loved all the songs even more.

As I mentioned previously, in general I don’t really like this type of music. Screaming in songs is not really my thing. The closest I probably got to this style is some old Avenged Sevenfold and maybe some of the newer Parkway Drive. Otherwise, I’m more of a hard rock and classic metal guy. I like my music melodic with big choruses.

Anyway, against all odds I listened to What the Dead Men Say (WTDMS) for months. It became my 2nd favorite album of 2020 (behind H.E.A.T II). I even purchased a ticket to their July streaming concert, which I quite enjoyed even if I didn’t know most of the non-Dead Men songs.

So after that I figured I ought to try to work through their back catalog. After all, I was loving album 9, which meant I had a lot more potential music to enjoy. I re-listened to The Sin and the Sentence and although I liked a few of the songs, I didn’t like all of them. Then Silence in the Snow, which was OK. I did like the lack of screaming, but I found it a bit boring in places. I then tried Vengeance Falls and I don’t remember anything about it, other than Strife which is a great song.

On the Trivium subreddit, all everyone would talk about is that WTDMS is great, but Shogun is still tops. So I figured I’d try it. Now this was interesting. The music and musicianship was utterly amazing. The singing was strange to me, though. When not screaming, Matt sounds exactly like James Hetfield to me. I like Hetfield, but I don’t need a sound-alike. And there was quite a bit of screaming. So although I thought it was a good album, it didn’t click with me.

I then thought that maybe WTDMS was an anomaly for me, so I stopped and didn’t try out the rest of their catalog. But I kept listening to WTDMS.

In the Court of the Dragon

After all that rambling, it’s time to actually talk about In the Court of the Dragon.

During the past year I’ve been following Trivium on Twitter and in July they dropped a teaser about something, which ended up being a “film” for In the Court of the Dragon. It was very mysterious as at the time no one knew if this was a single from an upcoming album or just a one-off thing.

Soon they announced that is was a single for a new album by the same name that would be out in October. Now this isn’t the 70s when artists put out albums every year, so this was a big surprise. Pandemic or not, putting out two albums in two years is crazy these days.

But I didn’t really like In the Court of the Dragon as a song at first. After all, it starts with screaming and it’s all screaming for the first two minutes. But that chorus is badass and the song ends strong.

Then the next single Feast of Fire came out. This was more to my liking as it was a more straightforward hard rock / metal song. A week before the album drops they released The Phalanx and I saw that Reddit was going nuts with it being some sort of leftover song from Shogun. Since this was only a week or so before the album release, I decided to wait for the album and didn’t listen to it standalone. That turned out to be a smart decision.

In preparation, for the release I had been listening to WTDMS again and I also decided to give Shogun another shot. This time, I really appreciated it more. I still don’t like the James Hetfield copycat voice, especially as Matt’s current singing voice is so much better, but the songs are all pretty great.

At it would happen I also again had release day off from work, so I queued up the album to listen on my morning dog walk.

Ho. Ly. Shit.

This thing kicks ass, especially when you listen to it front-to-back in order.

The X intro works to allow me to ease into In the Court of the Dragon (ITCOTD) and provides a great contrast to its first two minutes (1:45, actually) of screaming. By itself it’s not nearly as good as IX is an intro to WTDMS, but it fits its song well. It’s weird, a bit spooky and atmospheric. That dragon roar at the end is cool.

Sword Over Damocles is wonderful, I love how it slows down for the chorus and I really like the lyrics. It flows nicely into Feast of Fire.

I know Trivium diehards are not big fans of these “radio tracks” as they call them, but they serve an important purpose to get people like me to listen to Trivium. The screaming can be a shock when you otherwise don’t listen to this type of music and these songs allow us to ease into their style gracefully.

A Crisis of Revelation is also great but it’s probably my least favorite track (something has to be, I guess), perhaps because I know what’s next. That’s right, it is The Shadow of the Abattoir (I had to look up that abattoir means slaughterhouse), which starts as this slow, sublime song with some amazing singing that jumps to another level several times in its 7 minutes of glory. It’s a masterpiece.

Don’t. Go. Searching for the battle
You won’t. Find. Any beasts to slay
You’ll rip yourself to pieces
You’ll drive yourself insane
In the shadow of the abattoir

No Way Back just Through is my kind of rocker and a great contrast to Abattoir. Short, fast, powerful, only a little bit of screaming. Love the jangly guitar in the bridge and the super-chug ending.

Fall Into Your Hands starts with a fun drum solo with a soft guitar in the background, a perfect way to show off Alex. Verses are screamed, but I don’t mind it. You don’t hear some singing until the first chorus at just over two minutes! This song has a “go!” in it! I love the middle:

What if we were meant to fail?
What if we were meant to die?
What if we were meant to fail?
Running for our whole lives

Overall more screaming than I like, but I can’t fault it as everything works. This is pretty epic, especially finishing with that orchestration.

From Dawn to Decadence continues the amazing riffs as this is a shorter rock song. It does start with screaming, but at this point I love it, although it might be just gravely singing tbh. The chorus is catchy AF.

And then The Phalanx starts with that wonderful “chugging”. And that switch at the end to the final outro is a thing of beauty. It perfectly encapsulates everything on the album that came before. This is one of the best songs to close any album, ever. Plus, more orchestration!! I am really pleased that I waited to listen to this as part of the full album.

The drumming. The bass! Trivium’s rhythm section is second to none. The drumming is authentic and real —it doesn’t have that robotic feel you hear in a lot of newer rock. Alex Bent is truly a genius.

Paulo on bass is also impressive. The mix does a fabulous job of ensuring you clearly hear the bass and rightfully so as it needs to be heard.

Overall the mix and production are top-notch. The album sounds great on everything I’ve played it on, headphones, Bluetooth speakers, car stereo and 100 watt stereo with speakers and a subwoofer.

9 songs (I count 1 & 2 as one song), 52 minutes of a gut punch of kick-ass, yet meaningful music. The production quality is top-notch, the musicianship is is flawless, the singing is great. And yes, even the screaming is perfectly placed.
I listened to this repeatedly over the rest of the long weekend.

It’s now the new year I write this and according to last.fm I have so far I’ve played (scrobbled) the songs on ITCOTD 484 times!

You got me Trivium. I’m a fan. Keep up the great work.

These guys truly need a headlining tour. I didn’t go see them in Boston last fall because they were supporting Megadeth and Lamb of God, neither of whom I much like, so I didn’t want to go to a show where they only play for about 40 minutes. It turns out they are coming to Portland in May as part of the same tour, so even though they won’t be playing for long I am going to have to go to this.

1. I create playlists for each season with new music that I’m listening to. I do enjoy going back to prior years to see what I was listening to back then. I have these seasonal playlists going back to 2015 when Apple Music came out.