Baring the ambiguous ‘blackened death metal’ tag, France’s War Inside are a competent new act who do the genre label well on their second album, SUTURE. Of note, War Inside features Thomas of Regarde les Hommes Tomber on vocals, who brings the ‘blackened’ element to the table with his pained rasps and screams (and a few deeper bellows).  As a result of he and some decent song writing, War Inside is other wise a pretty solid, standard European death metal act at its core.

You can hear strains of Behemoth and other Polish bands as well as Hypocrisy and a solid Gothenburg melo death metal canter (“Name Us Defective”, “Connivance”). It’s got a polished production, some decent beefy guitars and ample parts of both big chunky riffs (“Body Bones”, “Maggots On Candies”) and some more brutal hues as heard on opener “Demigurg” and some blacker elements like “The Miligram Whore” and the final act of closer “Rictus”. The blend is very well done with seamless melding of styles. Clearly though War Inside is a death metal band at heart, with Thomas’s vocals being the black sheen.

The whole effort is pretty well done and certainly a solid album that I’m not skipping over. In fact, the largely instrumental track “Penance” has a lot of promise, displaying a very Hypocrisy like balance of lean mean chug and melodic leads. That said, I’m not clamoring for the the album and I cant say I’ll remember the album any time after the review is written. But, considering the large amount of CDs I get to review and this one was covered due to it’s relative decency, I’d call that a win.

[Visit the band's website]

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