Register Forgot login?

© 2002-2024
Encyclopaedia Metallum

Privacy Policy

Detonation > An Epic Defiance > Reviews
Detonation - An Epic Defiance

Ah, the days of swarming melodeath clones - 60%

Annable Courts, January 30th, 2022

Right off the bat it should be said melodic death metal quickly became a fairly hollow subgenre of music. Some time during the 90s a few bands started using a backbone of Iron Maiden with the bass as the anchor and twin lead guitars soaring in stereo, and added a chunky load of underground metal to it to beef it up. Great idea. Only that concept would quickly turn null, as there were only so many ways bands could shuffle those cards before every game looked distinctly familiar, if not repetitive to death.

Detonation here do alright avoiding sounding like cardboard metal that's melodic for the sake of being melodic. At least at first. The riffs are constantly harmonized which doesn't help each song sound separate and this groups them up as all having a similar flavor instead, but there's an effort here - for part of the album - in creating actual songs with recognizable patterns instead of the habitual overly melodious truisms found in this genre. After a while the songs do sound like they're spamming the same bass changes and they become a bit less defined. It's disappointing given the quality of the first few tracks, but that's likely why this album never got a whole lot of hype. Plenty of bands were doing, and had been doing exactly this, and 'An Epic Defiance' just isn't consistent enough to stay clear of the competition.

It's too bad the band didn't have more in store. The first three tracks (excluding the intro), although hardly revolutionary, are genuinely well-written melo-death. The material there is riffy and catchy as hell; like, a few listens will have any listener humming them for a while; and it blends a bit of brutality with those blast beats in over the slick guitar work, while the vocals bring that standard high-end presence. The album does feel a bit static production wise: the guitars aren't the fullest sounding, somewhat rectified by a very adequate and punchy drum sound. Also the vocals sometimes sound static too. They're decently executed on the whole but they sound like they're doing a bit of a copycat job on the industry standards.

This is from 2002 and around the early 2000's, melodic death was the shit as it was a great compromise between melodic hooks and heavy music, so if you were a teen and to some extent a Gen X headbanger, or if you were an outsider to metal, chances were you were in on the fun to some degree. In that field it didn't matter if you actually wrote and played music that had purpose just so long as your stuff came across as vaguely headbangable and had even a semblance of a catchy, melodic element there to hang onto. So: testosterone and emotions, the young person's game. It was mostly about the overall sound, and how skillful a band sounded, rather than how good the band was as song-writers. Obviously these melodeath clone albums never made it anywhere significant in hindsight, but they were "cool" and easy to listen to while they were coming out.

So the story here is: 2000's melodeath clone with promising start, that goes bland. That's the headline. Probably give the first 3 tracks a listen (not counting the intro) and then move on.

A New Hope For Melodic Death Metal - 90%

Tongues11, May 10th, 2005

"An Epic Defiance" is Detonation's first full-length release and I must say that it's nothing short of a masterpiece. The first time I saw this CD in a store I didn't even know who Detonation was. Still, I bought the album (life is full of surprises and a dutch death metal band seemed to me like something different to listen to). When I put the disc in my player on the way back home, I couldn't believe it. A little band from Holland had created something that could compare to Wages Of Sin, or Colony. The music is rich and developed and the musicians are giving performances that promise a long and successful carreer. But what really struck me on this album were the drums. Thomas Kalksma, never heard is name before, yet he delivers a performance of such speed, intensity and technicality on every song that I still can't find a better drummer on the modern musical scene.


There's no question to the quality of the music and vocals on this CD and Detonation is a more than promising band in the Death Metal universe but although "An Epic Defiance" is unbelievable it's not perfect. Their music lacks one thing : uniqueness. It's well-written but, except for the mind-blowing drums, you can always sense the strong influence of other artists in the riffs. Luckily, after hearing a few samples from their forthcoming release "Portals To Uphobia", it seems that the formation have now defined their style.