You want to know how to get you self-released demo EP reviewed quickly? Send out a professional promotional package/folder that includes a retail CD, band contact information/bio, a poster, some glossy photos, a lyric sheet and some stickers. Even if your band is terrible, I’ll review your latest shite quicker than a few mp3s dumped into an email. Call me a CD whore if you like, but unsigned bands like Painted in Exile, Brazen Bull, Ever Forthright, The Pax Cecelia and now Orlando’s Quarter the Villain do it up right. Plus, we really need more bands that start with the letter “Q” in our reviews archive!

Luckily Quarter the Villain’s five song demo, Regicide is pretty solid. At least for the genre. Of course that depends if you enjoy modern, brutal, shredding tech/deathcore in the vein of Burning the Masses, Within the Ruins, Veil of Maya, Conducting From the Grave, Born of Osiris and such. Though only featuring a smattering of keyboards, the scattershot, noodly nature of the music treads the fine line between pretentious (silly song titles abound) spazzy nu-grind bullshit (Destroyer Destroyer, Dr Acula, The Irish Front, etc) and more grounded tech death metal/deathcore.

Luckily, the band resides on the latter side more often. Still they manage to display their considerable technical skill and chops with an expected array of blasts and breakdowns, all littered with lots of shredding solos and squeals as displayed in “Calculate Your Escape” and “Choking a Sloth” (where hints of Horse the Band’s 8 bit injections surface) ― it never annoys like most of the other so called nu-grind bands mentiuoned above.

Of the five songs, all are perfectly acceptable and enjoyable examples of the genre. Though, the only one that really blew me away was the closing of “Sock Puppet Vendetta”, where a clever circus-themed orchestral outro ends the song without being too awfully faux or gimmicky.

Another promising candidate for Sumerian Records me thinks?

[Visit the band's website]

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