Annulation - Human Creatures (2004)

Cost: $2.00

This certainly looked like it fell somewhere on the death or thrash metal spectrum, but I wasn't expecting such a strong mid-'90s Sepultura influence.  It really does sound like a death/thrash framework with lots of Chaos A.D./Roots-inspired guitarwork and groovy riffs.  Even the main vocals sound like a deathier version of Max from that period (ironically, at times they sound a bit like later Wagner Antichrist).  Admittedly, metal being influenced by anything that comes after Arise sounds like an awful idea in theory, although they avoid many of the worst aspects of '90s groove metal, and the extreme influences make this a lot more tolerable.

Whether it's only through Sepultura or not, I have no idea, but there seems to be a bit of a Brazilian fixation here--there's some limited Portuguese in one lyric, and another song uses a berimbau.  The end of the disc has an unlisted track with two (possibly) live songs, one being a cover of "Roots Bloody Roots" (of course).   The cover isn't very compelling and the original song (the title track from their first CD) leans more towards typical groove metal,  so these are the least interesting parts of the disc (plus, the crowd noise is quite obviously a looped sample, although at least they tried to be clever about it by dubbing in the band's name being chanted at one point).

So yeah, listenable stuff, although there's nothing particularly inspired or great here.