ARMORED SAINT
Emotion Factory Reset
Metal Blade Records – 2026
http://www.armoredsaint.com

The announcement of the new ARMORED SAINT album was met with quite a bit of excitement on my part. ‘Emotion Factory Reset’, the band’s ninth studio album hit the ground running with the announcement as it included the releases lead track “Close to the Bone” as its first single/video.

And that song served to only further enhance my anticipation for the whole disc. Produced once again by bassist Joey Vera (who was involved in all of the songwriting as well), the album finds ARMORED SAINT once again continuing to build on their past while moving forward in their musical journey at the same time.

With ARMORED SAINT, you know you are always going to get a strong powerful metal album, but the magic comes in how they use all of their musical influences to give each album its own unique spin on that foundation of heavy metal.

Before I even heard any of the other songs from the album, I saw an interview with Joey Vera done by KNAC’s own George Dionne and that interview set the bar even higher for my expectation level.

But what did I think of the album once I actually listened to it? Well now, join me on a little musical journey and we can find out together.

As I said, the album kicks off with the song “Close to the Bone”. (You can check out the official video HERE.) There’s a brief lead in to the song in full but once you get to the “meat” of the song, it is a full on explosion of sonic fury. There’s no let up in the song’s fiery relentless pacing and it makes for one hell of a electrically charged number to bring you right into the ARMORED SAINT fold and prime you for the rest of the album to come.

In listening to the song “Every Man – Any Man” for the first time, I thought the intro sounded almost like the guitar playing was inspired by the flamenco guitar. Or rather the rhythm I’ve heard played on a flamenco guitar in those rare instances when I’ve stumbled across that style of music. I don’t know that I’m even close on that connection but that was my first impression of the intro. But as the song progresses, it blurs that start and feeds into fulfilling rocker. After the song’s intro, the pacing picks up a bit but still seems like it is growing, going from a slightly underplayed hard rock type of musical score to a full on metallic burner as the song plays through. One of the things that really endeared the song to me as I was listening is that it doesn’t waste a note of itself, it powers through straight to the end and when you get there, BANG, the song comes to a crashing crescendo and is done.

For “Not On Your Life”, the music bursts from your speakers and you can immediately tell this is going to be an ARMORED SAINT track that just rocks your socks off. Singer John Bush won me over on this particular song with the first line of the lyrics. The delivery and phrasing of the line “You already know my name is John Doe”, was an instant ear-grabber for me. The song is pretty much a straightforward rocker but that one lyric just sealed the deal for me.

The track “Hit a Moonshot” was the second song to be released as a single prior to the official release of ‘Emotion Factory Reset’, but I followed my own personal rule about listening to just one track before I get to listen to the whole album. So the first time I heard the album was the first time I heard this particular track. In reading the press release that accompanied the download, I learned that John Bush is a big sports fan, which I don’t know if I knew that fact beforehand. Since “moonshot” is a sports term, it was pretty cool to know the songs origin at least the lyrical portion came from Bush “thinking about the parallels between sports and entertainment”. As for the song, I liked the extremely brief little intro that almost seems to be bent on establishing a mood. But much like “Every Man – Any Man”, it doesn’t go too far with that notion before eschewing it for a more direct burst of full bore metal music. Jeff Duncan had some great moments on this song but I also thought the drumming from Gonzo Sandoval should get some credit here as well. It’s not like he’s hidden in the mix or anything like that but besides what you hear in the top half of the song’s mix, there’s times when I thought his playing was slyly influential to how the finished song came out. And then you have the vocal performance from John Bush. Never one to miss the more power driven aspect of his vocals, I think Bush is underrated when you consider how he can turn on a dime and provide you with a more subtly rhythmic vibe and/or tone to his vocals and yet still feel like he’s blowing the doors off the place. I think ARMORED SAINT really outdid themselves with this fully realized and involving track.

One of the things I took from that interview with Joey Vera is how the majority of the ARMORED SAINT lyrics is how they are kind of general in nature, not telling you what or how to think but just kind of raising points. But for the song “Buckeye”, John got way more personal as the lyrics address his own daughter. So I was really looking forward to how that one would come out.

And as I listened, I was digging the way the band took a song with such a personal angle and still made it into a stunningly epic track in the ARMORED SAINT fashion. Bush’s lyrics are on point but the way the music flows enhances what he’s singing about. Gonzo’s drums are intensely epic in the pounding rhythms he dishes out. Meanwhile, the use of slide guitar gives a nice bit of twisty subtlety to the soundtrack. It’s a wonderful track, an ode to a child that has grown up and leaving the nest. Full of emotion and yet still a killer rocking track.

The guitar work on the song “Compromise” is what you’ll first take note of as the song kicks off. It’s the shredding that fuels the entire song and it keeps your energy level on an epic rising high throughout. But you get spotlight parts from both Joey Vera and Gonzo Sandoval as well. This track races through dark places with a zesty verve and six-string fireworks that will keep you buzzing throughout.

The song “It’s a Buzz Kill” was an interesting track for me. It starts off slightly slower in nature. The intro features Gonzo Sandoval setting the stage for the track. At first, the song’s pacing in both musical and vocal delivery are slightly restrained. But you can hear the guitars like they are just waiting to cut loose as they play through in what would sort of be considered “the background” of the soundtrack. But the song’s chorus sees the tempo grow more directly metallic in the delivery. The vocals from Bush get more focused and razor sharp as well.

At first I wasn’t totally sold on the song but after really sitting with and “in” the song, I found that the entire way the song was constructed made it not just an interesting songwriting exercise for ARMORED SAINT, but gave me a track I really had to focus intently on to grasp what was going on. While that might seem like it is damning with faint praise, for me I consider that a good thing. A song that makes me work to grasp everything going on is a damn fine thing in my book.

Reportedly, the song “Throwing Caution to the Wind” was written by the band in the studio. Talk about a “nod to the old school”, right. Well, it worked because the song comes through the creative process beautifully. It starts right at the beginning with some incredible guitar work, which begs the question are Jeff Duncan and Phil Sandoval one of the more underrated guitar duos ever? Another point in this song’s favor is the lyrical content. Hell, the first verse alone made me love the track. I mean how can you not be enticed into a song that starts with, “Today I left the concrete / for the vivid forest green / to open up the pathways / dip my foot into the stream”, no?

The song “Ladders and Slides” had me instantly converting the song title itself, as a child of the ’70s & ’80s, to the board game “Chutes and Ladders” but once I got control of my wandering mind, I locked into the song and was rewarded with yet another poundingly rhythmic track that features some killer drum work and a foot stomping vibe that had me tapping my feet along. I loved the lyrical content of this song because the lines seemed like they could’ve been drawn from multiple and diverse sources and yet they get combined to tell one cohesive story that makes you bang your ahead along from the song’s start until it comes to a crushing end.

With a title like “Bottom Feeder”, I have to admit to having a certain kind of expectation for where the song’s direction might be planning on taking me. But that’s why you listen to the music instead of just assuming. John Bush has a bit more of an edgy delivery in the main lyrical portions of the track. The music, while fully rocking for the most part, brings in more of a subtle tone at points of the song that only help to enhance the overall finished product. The drums are again given the job of being a stomping foundation from which everything else is built over the top of. I like the way ARMORED SAINT keeps you on the edge of your seat with plenty of metallic bonafides in the song and yet gives you just enough of a twist that there’s no way you can think, “Oh, it’s just another rocker track from them”.

The album closes out with the aptly named track “Epilogue”. But the song isn’t some kind of elegiac fade out as the album winds down. Instead, you get the band running through a song like their hair is on fire. The tempo is racing and that alone will get your own heartbeat rising to beat. But the rising and falling of the song’s rhythms is not the only thing it has going for it. Because that would sideline John Bush’s vocal performance and if you did that you’d only get half the track. As a fan of words and stories, I thought the lyrical content on “Epilogue” was some of the coolest sounding lyrics I’ve heard from ARMORED SAINT. There’s the thrust of the lyrics to match up with the music, but the way the words flow alongside the music at the same time made me sit up and take notice. Plus, if you read the words as you listen to the song, you find yourself drawn in that much more. Much like the rest of the album, this song is just amazing.

Amazing…I guess that’s what you could use as a one-word description of ‘Emotion Factory Reset’. It’s pretty easy and does the job. But as one who loves the band and is continually overjoyed by the way ARMORED SAINT mixes things up with each successive album release, it doesn’t seem to be quite enough, does it?

Whenever the band announces they have a new album on the way, I always find myself with growing anticipation. That can be a dangerous thing if the band doesn’t somehow meet those expectations. But with ‘Emotion Factory Reset’, ARMORED SAINT has not only exceeded whatever pre-conceived notions I may or may not have had but they once again far surpassed them. ARMORED SAINT has been on quite the roll lately and ‘Emotion Factory Reset’ is yet another damn fine addition to their incredible library of albums…and one of the best albums you’ll hear this year!

5.0 Out Of 5.0