Where _rEVOLVEr_ saw the band take several bold steps in directions they hadn't previously traversed, this time round they're almost playing it safe -- at least by commercial standards. Opener "The Flood" and the successive "The Medication" are easily among the band's most catchy and (let's not mince words here) yielding numbers to date; no bad thing necessarily, but a far cry from the proverbial battle-sirens of "99" or "Hate Song". With "The Prosecution", the billowing verse/chorus approach hints at leftover sessions from _Slaughter of the Soul_ or even _Terminal Spirit Disease_. Even Peter Dolving, a metallic revelation on _rEVOLVEr_, doesn't deliver his intensely personal discourse with the same tenet, and when he and the rest of his bandmates go all Deftones on our assembled behinds during "The Fallout" -- well, you do the math.

Despite what these observations might imply, _The Dead Eye_ remains a cut above simply being average. Heck, the brothers Björler would have had to have been perpetually drunk to have delivered mediocre. It's just a shame that what they do offer this time round is so damn ordinary (relatively speaking) because that's undoubtedly the last thing anyone would want to see The Haunted turn into.