Pivot
Natural Selection

November 2001
Released: 2001, Independent
Rating: 2.0/5
Reviewer: Michael De Los Muertos

How does one define “mallcore”? As sampling our Metal-Rules message board on any given day, you may draw the conclusion that judging musical genres is very much like judging pornography – you can’t define it, but you know it when you see (hear) it. I’m pretty sure Pivot is mallcore. Listen to tracks like “Middle of Everything” and “Tarnished” and you’ll definitely hear that pernicious rap cadence bleeding through everything. Today I’ll be a nice guy and not savage NATURAL SELECTION as badly as I do most mallcore albums that are mistakenly sent to Metal-Rules, but I will say that I find it unlikely a significant portion of our readers would find anything worthwhile in it from a metal standpoint.



It’s heavy on occasion, and the guitars are thick, but Pivot just doesn’t have much to offer the serious metal fan. It’s all extremely dull and fairly pedantic, until, of course, you come to the final two tracks. These are techno remixes of “Spark” and “33 Percent,” two songs that appear earlier on the album. As if one exposure to these tracks isn’t enough, two DJs (I assume that is their title) credited as “Dummy Plug Conspiracy” and “Technology Scum” give us a smorgasbord of sound-samplin’, synthesizer-bleepin’, record-scratchin’ fun that left a bad taste in my CD player that took several spins of a Blind Guardian album to expunge. Let’s just put NATURAL SELECTION back in the case and put it up on the shelf where it can’t hurt anybody, OK? Please don’t listen to this album. Please. Do a good deed and make Muertos happy. He’s had a rough month.