This feature worked spectacularly well for Queensryche’s Operation: Mindcrime as well as Alice Cooper’s Along Came a Spider. Using this technique, Spider, an album that could have simply been another of Alice Cooper’s famous shock-rock tunes, became a story of murder and redemption. Periphery’s Alpha and Omega, like One-Eyed Doll’s Witches, really could have used a bit of this.

 

But enough criticism. Periphery’s spectacular range emerges within the first two tracks, from the quiet opening of “A Black Minute” followed by the track’s strong melodic metal, to the screaming thrash of “MK Ultra,” which is a reference to the (hopefully defunct) CIA program aimed at developing and perfecting mind control through drugs and other means. Deeper tracks reveal influences from Linkin Park and their contemporaries, as the sounds veer from melodic to thrashing with much force; force that demands the strictest attention to the album’s story. Make sure you take your Ritalin, because as much as I enjoyed the experience, I couldn’t really drag out much of a story from the songs. Between the album art and some of the snippets of lyrics I could catch onto, Alpha and Omega seems to be a science fiction tale that calls upon psychological exploration of the self. The album’s press release stated that Alpha focuses on backstory and character development, while Omega “focuses on some pretty serious and gut-wrenching events.”

 

Despite my difficulty in grasping the concept aspect of the albums, I found much to appreciate and enjoy in this collection. Where “Alpha” and “22 Faces” display the band’s debt to Linkin Park and Papa Roach, the instrumental “Four Lights” demonstrates that Slayer is also among Periphery’s muses. The set’s least thrashing song “Priestess” includes some classical and Santana-inspired guitar and earnest singing. It’s easily the most radio-friendly song out of the 17. Almost every guitar solo on these records is more classical than classic, which is obviously a result of the guitarist’s training. It gives the tunes a unique sound. I’m more used to the Yngwie Malmstein, Randy Rhodes, and George Lynch school of guitar solos, so I generally feel somnolence when listening to classical guitar, but in this environment the classical guitars fit the mood well. The excessive rhythm guitar and bass pretty much preclude most notions of sleep, too.

 

Periphery’s full spectrum of sound comes from six members, including three (3!) guitarists, a vocalist who apparently does both the crooning and the screaming, and the standard bassist and drummer. Guitarists Jake Bowen and Mark Holcomb deliver the sonic punch, but based on the fact that Misha Mansoor has been on the cover of Guitar World before, he most likely plays lead. Bassist Adam Getgood and drummer Matt Halpern have also appeared on the covers of Bass Player and Modern Drummer respectively. Vocalist Spencer Sotelo rounds out the group with his incredible range. Obviously, the band members bring exceptional skills to the enterprise, showing that more than GarageBand enthusiasm helped to shape Juggernaut’s two discs of metal. Juggernaut Alpha and Omega may be this year’s ultimate metal album, because it brings together so many influences, sounds, and moods in such a dense collection. Fans of metal cannot afford to ignore these albums.

 

Conceived of as a two-disc concept album, Periphery’s Juggernaut Alpha and Juggernaut Omega cover a tremendous amount of ground musically, lyrically, and temporally. Temporally, the seventeen songs on these two albums clock in at nearly an hour and a half. Musically, Periphery demonstrate tremendous range musically, ranging from quiet electronic passages to the heaviest of hardcore thrash. My only quibble with the albums (besides the fact that they’re sold as two separate albums instead of one pricey double-album) is the lack of “connective tissue,” or dialogue that would make the story clearer.