'Til Ten Years

December Wolves had gone through quite a lot of change before their break up in 2002. 'Til Ten Years was their first and their best. The sound here is that of the melodic USBM genre, not too unlike fellow countrymen Fog, Draconis, etc.

TTY is comprised of 5 lengthy tracks, the interlude, "Our Centuries Have Been Found", and an outro. The quality of the recording is excellent, thanks to the South Korean record company Hammerheart Productions. Because of the length of the tracks, there allows for melodic passages, and changes of pace, rather than just mind-numbing blasting. Other than that, the tight blast beats fill most of the songs. The riffing is excellent and tremolo picked for the most part. The guitar is very melodic as well, giving the music a flowing sound, and balancing out the brutal drum tracks. Smails' vocals awesome, and are similar to those found on Completely Dehumanized, but the difference on that album is the backing music changed from melodic black metal, to black/thrash. Some keys and female-esque vocals are even thrown in here and there on some of the songs but they're minimized, thus avoiding detracting from the music. The title track is probably the best song on the album. Starting off with acoustic guitars, it picks up a bit and has some great clean male and female vocals, and has a nice chorus.

This is easily the best work of December Wolves. Completely Dehumanized was decent, too, but there was a change in the styled, and the lyrics were much more personal, focusing more on the life of the band, rather than those of the more morbid, paganistic nature found on TTY. Blasterpiece was just a disaster. The tracks all sounded the same, the drum machine was annoying, and the sampling gets so repetitive and lame. If you like the melodic sound of the American black metal genre, this is a mandatory album from the epoch of that genre.