Throughout listening to the album, numerous influences jumped in and out of my mental notes; Tear From the Red era Poison the Well, latter Gorefest, Machine Head, Skinlab, Boiler, Staind, Stompbox,  Element Eighty, just to name a few. And while this analogous mix of elements seems a bit iffy on paper, as well as slightly dated, with some increased heft and groove, the quartet manage to pull it off.

After the intro “Prelude to Reign” you get a pretty good glimpse of Bewized‘s overall tone as “Laceration of Innocence” lumbers into view with a beefy double bass and a pretty nice mid-song groove and solo. But with the good comes the bad, as the curse of the clean vocals rears its ugly head. Paschalis Theotokis has an otherwise impressive bellow that borders on death metal, but his clean vocals leave a little to be desired. I’ve heard worse, but his more baritone, heavily accented croon is just a bit off and far from other top notch clean metalcore voices, as heard in the likes of Odium and Across the Sun. The cleans are not a deal breaker, as they are not used a ton, but when they do kick in, I cringe just a little bit (i.e. ballad “Redeemer”).

Otherwise though, the release is solid. As I mentioned, The Noise Factory Studio production is beefy as heck, with a Nice Tue Madsen -ish chunk to it and drummer Kostis Tatsis has a steady, train on a tracks presence about his performance. In spite of the clean vocals, tracks like the aforementioned opener  “Sober”, “Cages into Cages”, “Conjure”, “Cyanide Blood” and “For This I Swear” often provide a thunderous, catchy and slightly commercial  sidebar to my usual listening choices without being full on commercial or pure Nu metal as there is just enough ‘real’ metal gruffness to keep things respectable.

Showcasing a mid-tempo, depressing sound, The Drowning sometimes comes off as something of a blend of mid-era Sentenced and early (Death vocal) Katatonia. Neither of these is English, I know. But, were they, they’d sound like The Drowning…if that makes any sense…like England’s twist on Scandinavian Doom/Gothic Metal. There are plenty of melodic guitar lines amidst the riffing, a blend of Death growls and pseudo-Black Metal high-end growls with splashes of clean vocals. The overall vibe of This Bleak Descent is, well, bleak and also sad with a hint of resentful anger (coming from the energy of some of the tempos). Some of the longer songs tend to add an epic feel bordering on traditional Doom Metal, but only placing them in the outer fringes of the genre. “Blackened Weave”, “In Sufferance”, the near 11-minute “Solitary White Ship” and head-banger “Forever Fall” are all well worth digging into.

I think anyone familiar with any of the other bands mentioned in this article have an idea of what to expect here. The Drowning are certainly a band to watch as they are more than capable of leaving a sizeable mark on the scene in years to come. They sound like a band on their way to something more adventurous, and that’s saying something because the music here is quite good as it is.