This album is quite an improvement from Redeemer. Redeemer, I thought, was quite forgettable and besides the title track and the cool ambient electronic song whose name I forget, I forgot abut its existence a month after it came out.
While I won't say that this might not happen to Monsters, Monsters isn't the failure I was expecting. Monsters has a handful of good songs, and the rest are forgettably quaint songs. Human-clad monsters, DEATH POINT, dope, FALLING, and Progress are all good tracks. They all have good aspects about them (in HMC where Hizumi goes bat shit crazy for a little while towards the end, DEATH POINT having a nice rollicking energy, dope having that simple, but cool riff that drives the entire song into epicness, FALLING with that nice bit of heavy riffage towards the end) that make them memorable.
The other half of the album, while not bad, you'd be hard pressed to find a "bad" song on this album, is quite forgettable. 13, while a try for something different, lacks the necessary energy and spark that it needed to succeed. LOVE IS DEAD is more of a novelty song than anything else, so despite the inherent catchiness of the song, I couldn't imagine myself going back to pick this song; DEVIL'S PARADE starts off quite well, but I've felt like I've heard this song from them numerous times before, but this song is probably the highlight of the lackluster songs for its dangerous undertones. And where I thought I've heard Hizumi and co. produce DEVIL'S PARADE before, FINAL CALL is the generic song. There's nothing really appealing about this song whatsoever. And now abyss. Abyss is interesting because it starts out with a rather dark and brooding intro, but changes about a minute into the song into a more melancholic, but uplifting tone. We actually hear Hizumi sing during this song as well. So despite me seeing what I think they were going for with abyss (a song that gives the feeling of hope to one who has been in their darkest of times), I don't think Hizumi and co. pulled it off as well as they could have.
TL;DR: ehh 6/10 is no bad for an album in which I probably won't listen to half of it ever again.
