Drenched in Grace

Proclaiming themselves as "your typical anti-hangover death metal combo" on their MySpace page, this band has some explaining to do. How, when your mind feels like it will explode at any minute will noisy death metal (however melodic), help your condition at all? Oddly, it does.


The first thing I notice about this MCD is its high quality production. This band appears to have missed out the hand drawn cover art/dodgy printed label stage, and gone straight to the high quality CD stage. This slightly ruins the whole point of a band first release (discounting their appearance on the Deathmetal.be compilation CD), but as I bought this because of the music, not the cover art, it doesn’t matter so much.


Now it comes down to the actual content of this disk. The CD wastes no time with long winded introductions and launches straight into the fury of “Harbinger of Silence”. The song is anything but. This track is typical of the melodeath genre with the rather formulaic shouty bit, melodic bit, shouty bit, solo, ETC.


The rest of the songs follow in a similar fashion with rather formulaic melodeath. However, this formulaicness does not ruin the MCD, far from it. The songs are solid, well done, well rounded musical pieces, which leave you wanting more from this band.


The one stand out track from this album has to be “Oppose Resistance” which starts out with a riff that could be from the next Electric Wizard album. This doom laden riff changes slowly into a riff more typical of the melodeath genre before it launches into the full flow of the song… And might I say what a darn good song it is.


My only critism of this MCD has to be it’s lack of exploration into the genres limits and it’s tendency to play safe within the confines of melodeath. Oh yeah, and the fact that there is only 25 minutes of music on the CD. I look forward to more.