Nine albums in, Sevendust continue to assert themselves as one of the heaviest bands of the post-grunge era with Black Out the Sun.

Always ones to keep things on the intense side, they bring plenty of metal influence to the party, keeping the music as heavy as possible with huge, chugging guitar riffs and pounding drums, giving the songs the kind of hard edge that some of their contemporaries just can't touch.

Part of this is, as usual, thanks to the considerable vocal talents of Lajon Witherspoon, whose soulful and dynamic vocal performance is able to inject just the right amount of emotional weight into the music no matter how heavy it might be, allowing the bandmembers to really go all out rather than lightening things up to avoid stepping on their frontman's toes.

With the exception of "Got a Feeling," the album's lone diversion into power ballad territory, Black Out the Sun maintains a nice level of aggression throughout its 13 tracks, and though Sevendust don't really reinvent the wheel here, ragers like "Till Death" and "Decay" bring plenty of the alt-metal heroics that fans have come to crave.

While it would be possible to accuse the band of standing still all these years, Black Out the Sun is such a solidly constructed album that it's hard to fault these guys for doing what they do best and giving the people the kind of skull-crushing hard rock that they're asking for, and just as we don't blame the birds for flying, we shouldn't blame Sevendust for making killer tracks like "Murder Bar.".