Review by Lawrence Stillman on October 9, 2024.

Prog is a wonderful thing; add it to a boring, overdone genre of music, and suddenly you have a brand new genre of music that never ceases to run out of brilliant songwriting ideas for you to explore. This album here by Eternity Void is a great example of this, blending prog with melodeath, the aforementioned boring and overdone genre, and creating something truly wonderful that explores a theme rarely explored in the genre of melodeath.

Torrents Of Devastation was released in early 2005 to little fanfare (due to the extreme metal being quite underground by then). While it blends progressive elements with melodic death metal, I noticed that there was also a significant amount of influence from black metal, particularly the album "A Blaze In The Northern Sky" by Darkthrone, especially with the tremolo picking that evokes the feelings of a winter landscape but is not too dreary and isolating like "Transilvanian Hunger". While it is an interesting premise for whoever reads this, do bear in mind that the opening of the album is anything but entertaining...

That's right, it begins with a generic, boring, cringey opener that is no different than any ear-bleeding metalcore song from the mid-2000s (look at the release date of this album again), but you only have to sit through that travesty for a little over a minute, as the Darkthrone/black metal-influenced tremolo picking takes over and it turns into a weird mashup of Blaze and Opeth's "Still Life", creating a (not so much now in 2023) rather unique album that should be given a shot from start to finish. It helps that the album is only 31 minutes long.

Instrumentally, everything here sounds simplistic; there are no complex riffs or fast guitar and drum tricks to be found here; it's just simple songwriting techniques utilized creatively to create a unique experience, so don't expect something like Ne Obliviscaris or Cynic, but instead, expect something closer to "Still Life", so you won't have your expectations raised after seeing "progressive melodeath" on the genre label of the band. While the growls are quite serviceable and the riffs are quite good for something as slow as this, I do like the bass sounding quite thick under the mix, like deep snow carpeting the land.

This album is quite underrated if you ask me. After so many hyper-complex prog/tech death metal albums, I want something simpler and melodic as a palette cleanser, but not too simple to the point of boring my mind out (*cough* Obituary *cough*). Maybe it's just me, but I do want to see more bands doing a more melodic and proggy take on Darkthrone's Unholy Trinity.

Highlights: 'Prayer For The Living', 'The Beginning Of The Storm'

Rating: 7.9 out of 10