On _Heavy Lies the Crown_, their fifth foray into the recording studio and first release for Ferret Music, you can't shake the feeling that seven years of under-recognized slog has finally started to wear on the East Coast quartet. Part of the problem at least can be ascribed to the increased reliance on some rather bog-standard melodies across tunes like "Firefight" and "The Hard Goodbye". Likewise, one could level the criticism that they dip into the Slayer, Testament and Metallica influences more often than they should. But as the scorching "Fail Like a Champ" so very vividly demonstrates, this is a band who are capable of decidedly more than they've given us here.