Review by Brexaul on May 29, 2024.

Back in late 2022, a new project caught my ear, and was very pleasantly surprised by the creative output of a Greek guy that delivered an ambitious metal opera. I reviewed Battle Symphony’s debut back in early 2023 and I wrapped up my presentation proclaiming “Battle Symphony makes a promise for a brighter future, and I really hope they can follow-up with a second album, because this one rocks and it can only get better”. Joke’s on me.

The mastermind behind the project did a creative u-turn and went from presenting a great sounding album with lots of heart and some huge moments, to serving us an absolute pile of steaming AI shit. He went from working with singers like Tasos Lazaris, Nicholas Leptos or Roberto Tiranti and having a crystal-clear production courtesy of Grigoris Giarelis, to clicking “generate” on his browser.

My bullshit radar started tingling a couple of months ago, when the “band” released a special single about the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Being the levelheaded carebear that I am, I thought maybe this was some sort of social experiment to test the public’s reception of AI generated music or hell, a belated April Fools joke. This was the most silly, obvious AI I had heard but I just brushed it off and went on with my life. But then I saw an announcement for a brand-new lineup of non-existent people, backed by newly made-up legendary producers and imaginary Swedish studios and it pissed me off. It pissed me off to such a degree that I went and listened to this abomination on Bandcamp, just so I could informatively bash it. I can understand that AI is slowly taking over everything and I’m positively convinced that some people will be able to create amazing things in a few years using it as an assistive tool, but this thing is not it.

The Empire Of God is fun, if your idea of fun is being punched in the balls for 44 minutes and 24 seconds every morning. From the obvious half assed AI cover (which ironically is the best part of this “album”), to the soulless and bland music, there is honestly no redeeming quality in this. Much like in visual arts, there are people that “create” an image basis a single prompt in Dall-e or Midjourney and then post it as their work, and there are people actually putting some sort of effort in using the AI as a tool instead of a replacement. Now, this is a reality that’s up to a lot of debate, the ethical part of using AI as a source of inspiration, or a gentle push out of a writer’s block, but this is not the point here.

The point is that this album has zero creative input. It’s just a mashup of Suno v3 generated clips paired with ChatGPT generated lyrics. Songs with no flow, structures with no coherency, overdone choruses that play a million times in every song, robotic acapella segments, this album has everything wrong with anything related to art when it’s stripped by human emotion.

There were maybe a couple of moments that everything lined up and sounded remotely cohesive, and I suspect there might have been a couple of keyboard layers added to claim human input, but the “music” worth mentioning in this 45 min ordeal is next to 0.

I was tempted to ask ChatGPT to write me a review about “a band that went from a new promising act that was gaining momentum to a joke in less than 2 years” and submit that review instead, but no machine can shout “Fuck off” louder than me.

Shame.

Rating: 0 out of 10