Cost: 99¢
I wish bands/labels would realize that yes, aesthetics mean nothing if your music is crap, but they can mean everything if I've never heard of your band. Initially I was going to skip over this because it was on Lifeforce and just looked like generic metalcore/HC. I looked up the band on metal-archives at the store and they were listed as death/thrash, so I went ahead and bought it. Further online info was very conflicted and made me pessimistic. I saw it described as both deathcore and death metal in various reviews, with The Black Dahlia Murder mentioned a lot. The label itself touted it as a blend of progressive rock and death metal, unfortunately mentioning System of a Down and Mastodon--way to make me enthusiastic about this, eh? The emphasis on the progressiveness had me somewhat expecting something Disillusion-like.
Of course, all of that turned out to be typical exaggerated advertising hype nonsense. There's nothing remotely progressive about the music. The only real odd/weird elements are the beginning of the album, where there are a couple more bouncy/spastic riffs (which I think is where the SOAD comparison comes in), and a few scattered sections with clean backing vocals. As nitpicky as I am about such things (as evidenced by this blog), I considered it no big deal. I don't even know if I would have taken any notice of it had I not been pre-conditioned by the promotional descriptions and reviews.
The Black Dahlia Murder comparison fits decently for some faster parts, but overall there's a far stronger The Haunted-style modern melodic death/thrash vibe. The vocals are a tad on the forced side at times, but thankfully they're still not typical HC vox. This isn't a type of metal that I particularly need to hear more of, but since they lean more towards the DM side of things and there are no
super aggro vox, it's done well enough for what it is. As this blog attests to, I've done far worse in the bargain bin.
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