Inhuman Violence

Taking their musical template from Fear Factory’s Soul of a New Machine and inserting a hyperactive drumming machine, keyboards and guitar solos that wouldn’t look out of place in a Power Metal album whilst shedding most of Fear Factory’s industrial influence. This young French band has talent and promise as the album blasts and solos it’s way through the 8 tracks on offer. In fact, the first thing that caught my attention is how clear the riffs are from the crazed drumming machine set at “Destroy. Fucking. Everything” speed that an inferior production would’ve buried, which is the fate of the oft-neglected Bass. Vocals are a guttural pitch and are sometimes pitch shifted to attempt bringing out an inhuman element to the songs though it makes growling along almost impossible because the vocals are that indecipherable which is a shame as the band has some good lyrics. Keyboards pop up to provide atmosphere at time with differing results.

The Drumming machine goes at such a pace at it sounds like it’s sonically vibrating at times, as in the keyboard-lead “Vengeance Bitterness”. The solos as mentioned earlier have a Power Metal, albeit with added discord, edge to them, which counteract the main raw Death Metal riffs. The band has a good grasp of song structuring with the galloping guitar and drums in “Wardomain”, the build up to the keyboard part in “We Burn in a Fire… But we’re Blind to its Light”, the opening keyboards of the last track “Calling the Dead Creatures of the Infra-World” as well as the solid riffs of “Sentenced to Death”, “Erase” and “Freedom for my Tired Soul”.

However, the album loses impact when they keep a song going, just to throw in an ineffective solo, in fact, a few solos, such as the solo for “Erase” don’t have that “humph” that good solos have. Some of the keyboards don’t add anything at all and only serve to annoy the listener who wants more riffs to bang his head to. I like guttural vocals as much as the next Metalhead but they sound weak as the music is just over powering them. That all said, this is a promising debut from Lex Talionis with plenty of good riffs and good song writing talent in abundance – let’s hope it isn’t squandered on their subsequent albums. Something for those into Death Metal to look into when they have some money to spare.