For their third album Shinedown are attempting to give listeners "a huge hard rock record that has a lot of crossover potential, but also some of the most insanely intense and heavy material that this band has ever tried..." They want to go "above and beyond what a human being thinks they're capable of recording." And while that sounds extremely ambitious, it may or may not make a good record.

For there third album Shinedown enlist Rob Cavallo as a producer. The man behind such memorable rock records as My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade, Jawbreaker's Dear You, Goo Goo Doll's Dizzy Up The Girl, and Green Day's American Idiot, is determined to bring Shinedown's vision to life.

What is really evident from the beginning is that this record is going to be loud, dense, and filled with thick guitar riffs. After a gradual build-up, "Devour" uses all the tricks in the bag to fulfill it's mission. It even has a fast paced Green Day like course, minus the charisma of Billy Joe Armstrong. After "Devour" it just gets louder and almost exhausting with the amount of intensity in the record. Even the slower songs like "Second Chance", "What a Shame", and "If You Only Knew" reach the same level of density and make for a shallow listening experience. Rob Cavallo helms the band's sound through thickets of distortion, but the times have changed; another Guns and Roses isn't necessarily a good thing.

At softer moments such as "The Crow & the Butterfly", which sounds closer to Train's "Drops of Jupiter" than Axel Rose's "Sweet Child of Mine", the depth of the music opens up, but how many more "I don't Wanna Miss A Thing"s do we need? Granted, the songwriting on The Sound of Madness is deserves a nod, with such practical wisdom as "sometimes goodbye is a second chance."

As hard and intense as this record might be, it doesn't have the same sort of song-power as forerunners Lynard Skynard, Aerosmith, and Guns and Roses had. Shinedown, as hard as they try, don't manage to break through the plethora of similar bands such as Default, Nickelback, or Theory of a Deadman.