Band:	Tristana
Album:	Virtual Crime
Style:	Alternative metal, Hard rock
Release date:	March 2015

01. Resurrection
02. Fallen
03. Wasted Time
04. Bloody Snow
05. Beg For Death
06. Jannie's Dying
07. Belladonna Deadly Nightshade
08. Killer
09. Lost The Whole Life
10. Hunting Fever
11. Ending

First off, this is not Tristania, the beloved Norwegian gothic band. It's also not Tristana, the 1970 Luis Buñuel film. I know, that's what I thought, too. This is Tristana, the reportedly reputable Slovakian hard rock/alternative metal band. Not to start this off on the wrong foot or anything, but I suspect that your time would be better spent pursuing one of the former two.

Like an awful lot of heavy alternative bands, Tristana simply rearranges pre-owned melodies and tones into a grab bag of blunt riffs and pedestrian choruses. The whole album feels constricted by placeholders and hastily-scribbled notes. It's more of a "yeah, that'll do for now" approach than the old college try, and while every now and then a ten-second songwriting crash course results in a curiously catchy tune, most of the time it just spits out this unremarkable claptrap. Occasionally the lulls are garnished by synthesized accentuations that add a little bit of color to the otherwise unspecialized skeleton of Virtual Crime, but with nothing substantial to build on, all it amounts to is a minor curiosity that could be used to much greater effect.

"Wasted Time," the lone claimant to the title of "highlight," acquired its position through the accidentally-prudential combination of these elements. Guest vocals from Rick Altzi of Masterplan, At Vance, and others lend it some gravitas, though how worthwhile it would be otherwise is difficult to gauge. After only a few listens, it already loses some of the refreshing sheen of moderate agreeability that separated it from its cousins, and while this album is not bad enough to be torturous (or even labeled "bad," really), I would not weather it for one song whose appeal diminishes steadily.

The raw, Alexi Laiho-ish screams that pepper the foreground and drop-tuned cudgels that serve as riffs sound all too familiar. Even with frequent splatterings of double bass and breakdowns, Virtual Crime still fails to break through the bubble of "safeness" that traps it in the realm of radio acceptability, stewing alone with all the grit and bite of the other mid-2000s hard rock bands who accidentally find themselves in the metal section.

Peter Wilsen has a good voice for a frontman, and Tristana have at least mastered the art of keeping things simple, short, and sweet. In the end, it doesn't really seem like their fault that Virtual Crime falls flat. They have pinpointed the sound they wanted to pursue, and they carried out their efforts pretty well, but never quite landed on the right combination of hooks and rhythms that can make this kind of alt metal more amenable to general audiences, and it never challenges itself enough to step outside the boundaries and hit on other niches. Let us hope that Tristana's future collaboration with Mats Levén produces something a tad more interesting.