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Black Tide’s sophomore release, “Post Mortem” shows some big improvements. On the band’s first record “Light From Above”, the album was mostly just chugging metal. It was damn good, but that’s basically all it was. Black Tide’s “Post Mortem” has plenty of chugging metal too, but there are also a couple of great ballads and they even cross over into mainstream rock genre on a couple of tracks. Not rock by numbers stuff, but more along the lines of the mainstream rock that doesn’t suck like Breaking Benjamin and Papa Roach. The other big improvement with this Black Tide record? The vocals. Gabriel Garcia’s vocals here are tremendous. That goes from his screaming to his ballad parts. Behind Garcia, Black Tide has turned into one of the best metal bands going. That’s not to say that they’ve delivered on all of their potential yet. Some of the songs aren’t as good as they could be. Don’t get me wrong, they’re all still normal to good, and a couple of them are excellent. But one of the main problems is that the three groups all sound the same. Mainstream rock tracks sound like each other, metal tracks sound like each other, and the ballads sound like each other too. There’s variety in the music, but that doesn’t mean that there’s variety in the choruses. There’s no doubt that Black Tide’s an awesome band, but there’s also no doubt that they’re going to get better. This is just beginning, if there’s this much growth from album one to album two… imagine the growth of album two to album three.