I've hinted at this in other posts, but something I've noticed after years and years of bargain bin diving for CDs (and a secondary reason I decided to start blogging about it) is that there are certain types of indie/local releases that seem to attract reviews and commentary from people who clearly don't have a lot of experience with metal. The worst is when it's obviously a non-metal listener friend of the band who is trying to shill for them (I saw this a lot when CDBaby still sold physical media). It makes wish they wrote something generically benign like "This is heavy and awesome" than try to fake their way through a description.
In this case, Fallen Legion is listed as death/thrash at Metal-Archives, and this specific CD is called thrash on one site, and classified as death metal in a webzine review. I felt pretty safe picking it up, thinking it would likely be some sort of modern thrashy melodeath.
Nope.
And this is why I take the informational side of this blog quite seriously.
After the intro, I was very unpleasantly surprised by metalcore filled with bouncy nu riffs and rather schizophrenic vocals. As the disc goes on, it's obvious the band is fond of adding lots of progressive touches to the music--odd time signatures, quirky bass runs, and some guitar noodling. Occasionally these parts seem somewhat System of a Down-inspired due to the vocals, although I'd say they give off more of a Between the Buried and Me vibe overall. While the proggy stuff is executed well, it's not in music I particularly wish to hear. Most of the extreme metal influence comes from the vocals, which incorporate both gutturals and shrieks. There is some melodeath here, and in fact I'd be comfortable classifying the final track "New Skin" as such, but elsewhere on the CD the core/nu stuff is very much at the forefront, and it's just not worth enduring the various influences here for such little return (nor trying to unravel them in written detail for a blog post). Two bucks not well spent.
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