And while not a game changer, this band and album, as with 2005s Winter Campaign ( which I recall reviewing for digitalmetal.com) and 2008s Welcome to the Warzone deliver what you would expect from Belgian death metal and Shiver Records; big burly, chunky death metal. And the band’s simple home grown hues along  the war mongering themes will please fans of Bolt Thrower, Jungle Rot and Humiliation, as the band deliver simple salvos of  chug-tastic death metal, thought a few surprises pop up there and there.

One such surprise starts the album with “Revelation VI:VIII” a somber  acoustic intro, but its short lived as Ruben Luts growls ‘c’mooooooooooon!” to start “Sacrifice to the Nuclear Cross” and get things going for real, bit also has its own little acoustic melody lurking underneath the blasting or mid paced, chunky death metal.  And a few other such injection litter the otherwise predictable, effective barrages of “Hellcommader Reign”, “The Cancerous Riot” or slow churn of “Volcanic Death”.

There’s the cool old timey propaganda sample to start “Old, Cold Rivalries”, there’s monkish male choirs in  the riotous “Orb of Alteration” and a cool melodic solo and  little off kilter stutter and stagger in “Another Taste of Carrion”. Then “The Final Congregation” ends the album as it started – with some more acoustics to complement the song’s more somber mood. And these little, slightly different parts keep the otherwise standard death metal a little more interesting, if still in the realms of simple and sturdy, much like Belgium’s death metal scene as a whole.

One thing I need to just get out of the way is that I simply despise the clean singing on this disc. It’s a warbly, pseudo-operatic, sadghost voice that makes me want to punch my computer screen. Your mileage may vary of course, but if Jacob Marley showed up one night and talked to me like that I’d laugh in his face and kick him in his spectral balls. Half the time the singing doesn’t even jive with anything else going on, as though the band forced the vocalist to track his parts before guitars were recorded. I mean, I get what they’re going for, that whole new wave gothic melodrama and all, but it’s just ridiculous.

Okay, with that in mind, To Drown is actually not a bad album due to the strength of the songwriting and instrumental performances. The compositions could stand to be more atmospheric but they have a good deal of variation to make up for it, jumping through upbeat and fast sections here and there, then slowing down with twin guitar harmonies and mellow, clean sections. I can hear early Opeth influence in a lot of what they’re doing, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. Everything flows pretty well together.

The grim vocals are solid enough, kind of like Moonspell but lacking some of the power. Not really anything special, but they slot right into place and do their job. I could get a real kick out of To Drown if that was the only kind of singing on the album.

Goddammit, I hate those clean vocals. I mean, come on, when you’re doing a rocking, Iron Maiden-inspired riff like on “The Well That Drowns Me” you just can’t whine all over it like that! It’s causing me more cognitive dissonance than a Gorod album. It’s like watching a great movie that suddenly has a really cheap special effect that ruins your suspension of disbelief.

Okay, sorry, back on track. I would say the album highlight for me is the combination of the songs “Regiment of the Hopeless” and “Of Dreams and Vanity,” which are basically one work across two tracks. The former crescendos from clean, cloudy softness into spooky riffage with the most evil (and most sparse) vocals on the album. The latter track is more developed with some really burning, ferocious sections alternating with more gothy verses. It works, and the vocals kind of actually try to stay on key some, which helps to not kill the immersion for a few minutes.

I’m really digging the murky production on To Drown. The bass could stand to be more audible, but hey you know, it’s heavy metal. Other than that everything is very clear, but rawness isn’t sacrificed to achieve it. I… Jesus, listen to that whining.

You know what? Fuck it, I’m done.

Massa Damnata continues this approach, while also dialing back the songwriting into more mid-tempo, rocking sort of black metal. Not dumbed-down, but just sort of streamlined. Little infusions of clean singing and some bluesy guitar solos add to the rock and roll vibe.

There’s a great consistency and flow to the album, such that it’s a little difficult to point out highlights. “In Praise of Folly” and “The 13th Horseman” show off the most variety in composition, with slow sections reminiscent of Thorns, while “In Gloria, In Excelsis” is the most furious and aggressive track presented. If anything that really demonstrates how much less vicious this album is than the last three, as it’s nowhere near blistering. You won’t find anything like “In Creation of a Mortal Spirit” or “Dark Ages” on Massa Damnata. The feel is more murderer-creeping-through-a-hospital than it is grim, northern forests.

They finally throw in a curveball with the final song “The Curtain of Darkness and Death,” an entirely melodically sung song that begins with a phone call to a lawyer admitting to killing a bunch of people. Instead of using a clean, chanting sort of voice that you often find sprinkled in black metal, the voice used on most of the track has more of a gruff, stoner rock vibe, and it honestly works really well.

Other than that, not much here is all that inventive, as for the most part it could have been released right alongside Satyricon’s Rebel Extravaganza, Thorns‘s self-titled album, and DHG’s 666 International. And though I don’t dig it as much (and it doesn’t have any zany electronics), I think it’s better than anything that those bands have done since then.

Warbeast MMVIII (since renamed again to Warbeast Remains) go one further than that to the level of insipid. Listening to the minute and a half of nu-metal bounce that is the exasperating first track is enough to not even bother giving the rest of the album a shot.

Okay, so now that we’re past that, how does the rest fare? To be honest it’s pretty inconsistent, though there are really promising moments. “Beyond Redemption” and closer “Fleshless” are quality death metal songs, while there are a number of fun, thrashy numbers. But unfortunately the pandering instinct to write nu-metal riffs wasn’t confined to the intro track. “The Blackness” and “Destroy All My Hate” are just ruined by them, despite the latter having some satisfyingly thrashy moments.

I guess the overall problem is that most of the riffing on the album is uncreative and rudimentary. I think I could overlook the bouncy crap if it actually felt like this band wrote it instead of snatching it right off of almost any mainstream release from 1999-2002. And this is true for a lot of the faster, more aggressive material as well, only less obviously. The writing just seems like stuff I’ve heard a thousand times, and it doesn’t have any particular quality that would make me say, “Oh, that’s a Warbeast riff!”

So what works? The vocals are actually pretty fantastic, a very forceful death approach with a fair amount of range and depth. They have a hollow, edge-of-breaking sound that hurts my throat to listen to. I love it. The solos are also enjoyable, being more melodic than technical and providing enough seasoning anytime things get bland.

I think the best thing going on though is the drums, which honestly provide better support than the riffs deserve. I guess that shouldn’t be too surprising since plenty of bands who rely on terrible, stop-start riffs manage to seduce great drummers. One of the mysteries of life, I guess.

In the end I guess what Stronghold does most effectively is demonstrate that good musicians don’t mean much when the songwriting is lackluster. And this isn’t to say originality is everything; some bands I love like Bloodbath and Darkthrone openly admit how much they rip off their influences. It’s just that Warbeast don’t succeed in making it their own, not even for a minute.

“I Viking” starts things off with a more ragged attack than I expected, though – it comes off like Windir with a more jovial feel. You kinda know what to expect here – classic folk melodies, fiddle playing, guttural vocals and blasting beats. The song itself gets fairly repetitive, but I think that’s the point, ‘cause you’re supposed to be moving around and kicking your leather-clad heels up.

Starting with the third track, “Trollistarne,” things get a little stranger. The lurching, clumsy piano at the beginning certainly calls to mind Finntroll, but more disturbingly, it reminded me of the wtf mountain man dance scene from Belgian horror movie Calvaire. (Seriously, go look up Calvaire dance scene on YouTube.) I don’t know if accordion/synth is supposed to be menacing, but blastbeats or not, it makes songs like “Den ware held” and “Geboren uit oorlogslendenen” come off like Viking carnival music. In the grand scheme of things, black metal is weird enough as it is, but trollish folk/Viking accordion party music is definitely out there.

And that all boils down to one question, which kept popping up throughout the album: do people actually party to this stuff? The band itself certainly looks like they could – the CD booklet features pictures of decidedly unaggressive-looking, flaxen-haired dudes in conspicuously clean tunics and leather gear. Oh yeah, and there’s a chick too. It looks all very Ren Faire/LARPy to me, but that’s not a bad thing – those people seem to have a good time. I guess you could get some friends together and throw a backyard Viking BBQ with a lamb on a spit and horns full of mead. Actually, that sounds like a fun party idea, so if I ever do decide to go for that, at least I have my soundtrack ready.

Released in the tail end of 2008, Decapitated For Research seemed to have been an overlooked deathcore entry amid the likes of Whitechapel, Carnifex, and admittedly it languished on my Ipod for the better part of 4 months but when the title track randomly came up on my Ipod during a workout, it piqued my interest to further explore an album I had previously miscast as by the numbers deathcore.

And certainly Days of Betrayal do the by the numbers parts of deathcore very well; robust breakdowns, dual screeched /bellowed vocals, a slightly forced sheen of death metal etc. But where most deathcore are content to litter the breakdowns with a smattering of piecemeal At The Gates hack ‘n’ slash galloping to break things up, Days of Betrayal are actually better at their between breakdown riffage than their breakdowns-which for the record are solid but hardly say Rose Funeral or The Great Commission quality. Rather than simply thrown in some vaguely melodic Gothenburg riffage or completely chaotic spazz fest, Days of Betrayal actually construct some solid high octane, melodeath on steroid moments between bludgeonings.

Granted, the whole affair isn’t terribly groundbreaking or quite ready for elite status in the genre, as it’s is still well done deathcore but it makes for a slight change from the breakdowns being the centerpiece of the album and certainly demands some attention from fans of the genre. Tracks like “Murder Ballads”, “Hanging By a Thread”, “Execute Hope”, and “The Next Victim” just have a more developed sense of varied song craft than many of their US peers with some well placed melodies and solos as opposed to a simple gallop, blast, breakdown, solo breakdown mantra, thought there is some of it present.

“Within Melancholic Rapture” does follow a by the number standard with a orchestral segue, but it does not detract from a surprisingly good and as I mentioned earlier, complete deathcore album that manages to sit astride the genres requisite elements as well as push the song writing department into slightly more respectable territory.

A very promising debut and another decent additon to Shiver’s solid roster.

Truthfully, I really don’t need to expand on the above paragraph as Counterblast isn’t the kind of album to either gush over or berate, but it does serve as a 39 minutes of tightly played black/death (slightly heavier on the black) metal that’s above average, (at least for its first half before the intensity wears off) in its musicianship and delivery. Drummer Jurgen Sterckx (or “Morbid”) is a steady force behind the kit and vocalist Peter Noens (both also serving in black metal act Natrach) has an ample rasp/growl, culminating in 10 tracks of blissfully blasting tenacity. No interludes, no experimentation, no mercy.

Look no further than impressively fierce opener “Downward Discipline” for the template for the rest of the album and only the first few minutes of “Hellkind” and parts of the six minute “Bleed Divine” offers any sort of reprieve with a slow menacing lurch to break up the assault from the likes of “March to Your Death”, “Heap of Wretchedness”, “Vermicular”, “Nailed to Iniquity” and closing cover of Terrorizer’s “Dead Shall Rise”.

Hardly a required listen, but an acceptable release if you need to be blasted into pieces.

The album’s 13 tracks are broken into 3 chapters: “The Chain Reaction is Initiated”, “The Chain Reaction is Terminated” an the “Chain Reaction is Saturated”, and comes with the expected interludes and segues (“Ever-Arch-I-Tech-Ture”, “Foreboding”) but they are not overused or cover done. The album focuses on extremely well crafted and paced tracks that cover the usual gamut of biting, busy, weaving tracks (the enacing “Incognation”, “Prophet Set to Witness”, “Demons Shelter Within”, “A Nation in Atrophy”, “The Midnight Grotesque”, “Ravager 1.6.6.3”, “Shackles Cross” ) and slower more restrained tracks (“Ashes to Flesh”, “Of Genesis and Apocalypse”, “The Omniscient”) and a ballad (“Threnody For An Ending” featuring Daniel Gildenlow of Pain of Salvation). But even if the tracks do fit a predictable format (slow/fast), within each track is a vast number of dizzying tempos, moods and vocal shifts wrapped in the superb soundtrack-ish synth work, making each track a can’t miss standout and an hour of utterly satisfying, flawless music.

Glossed by an expectedly pristine Studio Fredman production, a cerebral, intelligent concept as well as the flat out stunning songs and musicianship, Ever-Arch-I-Tech-Ture oozes quality at every serpentine riff and epic keystroke and is arguably the finest melodic death metal album of the year so far