Boal is a brutal death metal band, hailing from The Netherlands, playing a really chunky style of death metal that is mostly U.S. influenced, with some European tinges.  Album opener “Deranged”, blasts right out of the starting gates and the vocals are exceptional, alternating between ultra low gutturals and some screams.  If you’re a fan of bands like Devourment, Murder Made God or Pathology you will love these guys.

There are breakdowns all over the place, coupled with the vicious blast beats, that I do think the drums are a drum machine.  From the research I have done, no drummer is mentioned anywhere and while in some places, it sounds a little organic, by and large the drums are heavily processed, leading me to believe it’s a drum machine.  It’s very well programmed and at times you may forget it’s a machine.  The guitars sound amazing, really clear, crunchy and hearing the bass guitar creep into the track, “Symbols”, sounds great and rears its head every so often, to add to the depth of the music.  “Anxiety Collapse” also starts off with a nice groove, with some ultra guttural vocals-brutal stuff

Does anyone know what Boal means?  Like “I’m so hungry I’m going to eat some cereal out of this nice bowl?”, since they’re pronounced the same, it seems.  Who knows?, album cover, looks like it was done by Jon Zig, this was a download, from the band, so I’m not sure, but it sure has his design on it, with the little creepy bastard monsters crawling around.

The music is well played and some really good guitar parts-they know how to play their instruments, that’s for sure, but it’s not like we have not heard this a million times before, right?  So in the originality department, it will not win any awards.  I’m hoping they can make that their plan of attack on their next album and maybe a real drummer too, if it’s feasible.  However the music is played with enough brutal conviction to cause some turmoil in the pit and for that I will say INFINITE DEPRIVATION is worth checking out if you love brutal death metal.

[Visit the band's website]

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