Review by Vanass on June 5, 2020.

Once you get the opportunity to throw a view at the cover of this release, it should become painfully obvious that some flaws have to come along. No matter how much they tell you not to judge a book by its cover, do it! By having such a gory and sinister cover art, one should expect pure death metal with tendencies in a direction that leans into the filthiest corners of this great genre. What we got instead is a mish-mash of genres ranging from clean melodic death metal and something that resembles metalcore to slightly refined brutal death metal with some black metal around the edges.

A praiseworthy thing about this release is the production quality that simply cannot be described as anything less than top-notch; the guitar sound is as clean as Obama's history, the vocals completely understandable and the drums would make me come in my pants in a better context. To continue with the good stuff, we have to mention the incredible vocal performance of Thaddeus Riordan. The guy is simply a high-skilled giant who knows his job very well and seemingly puts off an amazing performance without much effort. His repertoire of different tonalities and generally the swapping of the “voices” he utilizes, simply impressed me and held me entertained throughout the whole listening process.

Luckily, the vocals aren't the only enjoyable thing to be encountered here. The incredible performance of Casey Leblanc, the gentleman behind the drums, was perfectly underlined by the high-quality production. If you are a fan of fast music, this is the guy you need, his blast beats are precise, always on the right spot and dictate a decent tempo. Once you hear this album from beginning to the end, a simple pattern will show up; if it's fast, it's good. And rightly so as it seems to be one of the stronger elements in the music of these gentlemen from Louisiana.

And now the bad news... As much as I am impressed and have to admit that the drumming infused so much life into the guitars, I have to say also that much of it simply got lost in the aforementioned mishmash. Both guitarists wrote riffs that if they were to be heard isolated would sound great, yet ultimately fail to achieve any sort of harmony when put on the same track. It almost seems like they got distracted by the attempt to achieve high niveau of technicality, which they surely have, but not necessarily in a good way. There were simply too many curves in their music and not many of them made too much sense. They switched tempos seemingly arbitrarily, went from melodeath riffs to brutal death metal, and then continued towards some riffs in the style of good old Immortal. All these details resulted in discord, which made the whole thing relatively forgettable to me.

Admittedly, not everything is so black, there is one track that stood out to me personally. It is the fifth track and it's called 'Fear The Worst', which could be described as Arch Enemy meets Seigneur Voland on some dirty death metal ground. The song is actually an example that the guys are actually quite able to direct their taste and technical skills into some good songwriting and thus actually make music that is worth remembering.

As a whole, these guys certainly do not deserve to be forgotten that easily because they are pure professionals with their instruments. It is certainly enjoyable in some ways, but as a whole, this release is pretty mediocre, and I would certainly abstain from recommending it if it weren't for the amazing vocals and the drumming. Thus, I would advise you to watch what these guys are doing, someone who can play his ass off with such intensity will certainly release a killer record in no time.

Rating: 6 out of 10